FOREWORD

The People in the Story

Midway between the Arctic and Indian Oceans, the Mediterranean and the Sea of Japan, stands a range of mountains called the Altai. From its lush valleys and grassy uplands have sprung races and leaders who have spread far and wide across Asia—to Peking, Delhi, Samarkand —and even to the very heart of Europe. Many of them are names which, according to the point of view, strike terror and contempt, admiration and pride. Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, the Moghul Emperors, even Attila are among those the Kazaks and Mongols of the Altai claim as their ancestors.

Those who followed such leaders were, like the leaders themselves, hardy, confident, ambitious, ruthless, hospitable men, and so, today, are their descendants. Ready to ride forth, even to the ends of the earth, to win renown in the service of a man of action; equally happy to ride recklessly, hawk on wrist, through their own beloved mountains, moving their felted tents up or down the alpine valleys each spring and autumn and caring for their innumerable flocks and herds, heedless of the world outside, even of the Great Silk Road between China and the West along which Marco Polo rode five hundred years ago almost past their very tent doors.

But the world has grown smaller in the centuries which have ridden past the Altai since Marco Polo's day, though the Altai folk knew and cared little about this contraction till the outside world gradually began to hem them in towards the end of the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, they themselves had grown and multiplied, expanding instead of contracting, and their belled flocks and herds of two-humped camels, fat-tailed sheep, goats, cattle and their beloved horses had done likewise. The Mongols spread mainly eastward. Most of the Kazaks went westward into what is now Soviet Kazakstan—an area almost as big as the whole of Europe the right side of the Iron Curtain—but some turned southward over what is called Dzungaria and up into the huge mountain chain known as the Tien Shan, or Celestial Mountains.

The traditional home of the Kazaks

Sinkiang was re-named The Autonomous Uighur Republic in August, 1955

This true story is mainly about the southern group of Kazaks whose traditional home happens to be in an area over which the Russian and Chinese imperialisms have been quarrelling for centuries. By the beginning of this century, the dividing line between them ran along the Altai Mountains and to the north of the Tien Shan. But neither the Russians nor the Chinese were content to leave it there. On both sides of this still debated frontier, across which the Kazaks once roamed freely and as the rightful owners, lie rich deposits of gold, wolfram, coal, copper and other metals, probably including uranium. Moreover, both the Altai and the Tien Shan and their subsidiary ranges support very many cattle and sheep.

In the past, the Kazaks used to play off one greedy set of imperialists against the other. The system worked well at first but when the Bolshevik tyranny usurped the functions of the Tsarist one, it began to break down. In less than fifteen years after the establishment of the Communist regime in Russia, the Communists gained economic, and then political, control of the Chinese province of Sinkiang in which the 800,000 Kazaks of our story were living. With only a brief interval they have been in control ever since.

So, for the past quarter of a century, the Kazaks of the Altai and Tien Shan have been fighting a gallant but hopeless battle. Instead of meekly submitting when the intruders came into their homeland, they took up arms and tried to drive them out. Fighting, of course, is in the Kazaks' blood, and there is no gainsaying the fact that they love it. But this time they were fighting not for gain or glory, but for their way of life. And when they could fight no longer, many of the survivors braved known and unknown terrors in the arid deserts and stark mountains of the Takla Makan and Tibet rather than submit. Many perished on the way. But some, not more than about 2,000, won through to Kashmir and in due course were invited to make new homes in Turkey. It was there that they told me their story. Indeed, I went specially to try to persuade them to tell it to me because it is one which, while it was happening, the Communists managed to conceal from the outside world. I soon began to understand why they wished to do so.

As I listened to what the Kazaks had to tell, I found my thoughts continually harking back to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses; to David and Jonathan; to Elisha, Jeremiah and other familiar Biblical characters. There is—or was—a very great similarity between the Kazak way of life and that of the ancient Hebrews, although the Kazaks are Moslems, like the Turks, and have been since before the fourteenth century. They also claim to be of common origin with the Turks, and some of them certainly look Turkish, but most of them are nearer to Mongols in appearance. Their way of life, however, has been handed down from die days when nomads all over Asia moulded their lives on one common pattern so that it has much in common with the life of the Old Testament patriarchs and the Bedouin tribes of the present day as well as with the Mongols and with the Goths and Huns who swept through Europe in the so-called Dark Ages the name of which always makes me wonder what our own age will be called when it has passed into history.

So far as I know, the Kazak version of nomad life has never been described for English readers and I have therefore tried to write the epic story of their adventures and sufferings, not as an outside observer, but from their own standpoint: to show, before their way of life is forgotten, what manner of men they were—and still are at heart—and what kind of lives they used to lead until the blight of Communism fell upon them. When they were treated as an inferior colonial race, they resisted, as we ourselves did when Hitler tried to treat us in much the same fashion. So, of the 800,000 Kazaks who lived in the Chinese Province of Sinkiang—or East Turkistan, as the non-Chinese inhabitants prefer to call it—at least 100,000 are now dead.

The meagre accounts of the great Kazak epic which were reported when the survivors of their final exodus reached Kashmir betokened an unusual steadfastness of moral purpose and defiance of odds comparable in their own different fashion with the determination shown by the Pilgrim Fathers when they decided to leave England and build a new society across the Atlantic, and with the stubborn courage of the Children of Israel when they defied Pharaoh and journeyed forth into the wilderness under Moses, and also with the gallant Ten Thousand Greeks whose escape from another part of Asia was immortalised by Xenophon. When I learned that the Kazaks did not feel they could settle happily in Kashmir and were about to move to Turkey at the invitation of the Turkish Government, I decided to go to Turkey myself to learn why they staked their lives on such a desperate venture and what had befallen them during their 2,000-mile journey to freedom.

The story really begins at the close of the nineteenth century, in 1899, the year in which Osman Batur, Osman the Hero, was born; the Year of the Boar according to the day of reckoning the Kazaks borrowed from the Chinese. In those days, the Kazak tribesmen were still living very much as they had always done, not merely since the days of Genghis Khan, but since the time of Abraham and Isaac. Abram, as he then called himself, agreed with Lot whether their tents should be pitched to the right hand or to the left, in the plains or in the mountains of Judaea. The Kazaks similarly divided among themselves, and with their Mongol neighbours, the Altai and the Tien Shan Mountains and the habitable parts of the low-lying land of Dzungaria between these mountain ranges even though, as in the time of the Hebrew patriarchs, there were other folk living on the same land and cultivating parts of it. And, still like the Hebrew Patriarchs, the Kazaks moved their tents according to the season.

They journeyed up into the hills—much higher ones than those of Judaea—during the spring and summer, when the mountain pastures were green and succulent to the very snow line, ten to twelve thousand feet above sea level. They came down again to the more sheltered camping grounds on the edge of the vast steppes and deserts of Central Asia when the cold winds of autumn brought fresh snow. Beholden thus only to God, and to their flocks, for their daily food, and even for their dwellings and clothing, the Kazaks roamed the countryside as they pleased, often with hawks on their wrists, like our own ancestors in feudal days. And as they rode, they sang haunting, many-versed melodies each stanza usually ending with one prolonged note which echoed back and forth between the hills like the swell of an organ.

Most of the Kazak refugees who are now in Turkey, but not all, belong to the Kirei tribe of Kazaks which sports a little cluster of owl's feathers in its tumak, or hat, to distinguish it from other Kazak tribes. The whole Kirei tribe is numbered in hundreds of thousands, but mostly it used to live in small units or clans, until the Communists decreed otherwise. Each of the little groups numbering, say, a hundred families—three or four hundred people—-had its own chieftain. For the most part they were rich in animals if not money, and a group of that size frequently owned, partly as individuals and partly in common, as many as ten thousand sheep, two thousand cattle, two thousand horses and a thousand camels. So the air round a Kazak encampment was filled with sound: the bleating of countless sheep and lambs, the lowing of cattle, the belly-grunts of camels. Mingled with these pastoral noises were the clangings of deep-toned camel bells, the coppery clash of cowbells and the tinny tinkle of the little sheep bells.

When the Kazaks broke camp, every healthy adult animal was pressed into service to carry the group's multifarious belongings, including the babies till they were old enough to straddle, first a sheep, then a cow, and finally, a horse. Thus at an early age every Kazak boy and girl became a skilled rider. Many of the boys fought their first fight against Chinese or Communists before they were ten, although the most famous of all the modern Kazak leaders, Osman Batur, whose name has already been mentioned, did not go into action for the first time till he was twelve.

Osman Batur's teacher in the art of fighting was a guerilla leader named Boko Batur, whose name is as familiar to the Kazaks as Robin Hood's is to us, though few outside East Turkistan have ever heard of him. In Boko Batur's time in the days of the Manchu Empire, the Kazaks fought against the encroachments of the Chinese tax-gatherers who seized their beasts and called it taxation, and against the Chinese immigrant farmers who sought to drive them off the land which had always been theirs and farm it. Later the fight developed into a struggle against the attempts of Chinese and Russian Communists who tried to order Kazak lives on Marxist lines, herding them into collective farms or taking them as fodder for the wheels of industry in Soviet-owned mines and factories.

When I asked Hussein Tajji, one of the chieftains now living near Develi in Turkey, why he had left his homeland, he replied:

"It is better to die than to live as an animal. An animal looks to man as though he were God. It is not right that a man should look to other men in such a fashion."

Nearly a century earlier, another Kazak leader, Kine Sari, used much the same words when the Russians bribed a Kazak to try to trick him into accepting terms of peace.

The envoy, as the story goes, said:

"Can the horned ram, even though he be the leader of a mighty herd, defeat the lion?"

Kine Sari answered:

"He who sets a snare for an evil purpose, leaves his manhood therein. Is it not better to die in battle, or perish in the waterless desert, than to accept dishonour and live as a slave?"

In this faith, the Kazaks of our own time girded their sword-belts and hand grenades round their waists, slung their rifles and machine guns—when they had them—over their shoulders and mounted their horses to give battle. They were no longer intent to conquer Asia and beyond as in the days of Genghis Khan and Attila and Tamerlane; they were putting up a last fight to save their cherished way of life from being destroyed by the two most powerful imperialisms Asia has ever known—more powerful than Genghis Khan himself and more ruthless—the Soviet Union and China. The fact that the Kazaks stood no chance whatever of succeeding against such foes did not deter them for one moment. They felt, like Hussein Tajji and Kine Sari, that it was better to die than to live as animals.

What began as a battle against Chinese nationalism and turned into a battle against Communism, Chinese and Russian combined, went on spasmodically and with growing bitterness in the years between 1930 and 1951. In the latter year came the climax: the exodus to Kashmir across the grim Takla Makan desert and the inhospitable mountains of North Tibet. The final phase, so far as we are concerned here, followed fifteen months later, in 1953-4: the journey by air, land and sea from Kashmir to Turkey. There, thanks to the generosity of the Turkish Government, the Kazak refugees now have roofs over their heads, though I suspect they would rather have tents.

Before I tell the Kazak story, it is necessary to introduce some of the principal characters from whom I learned it. First, there is Ali Beg. In his native land Ali Beg was a chief. Turkish law does not recognise such a rank, holding that all men, except perhaps officials, are equal. Ali Beg, however, cannot help being one of those individuals who is more equal than others. Anyone who has visited Ali Beg at his home in Salihli can see for himself that he is still the head of the little Kazak community of some three hundred families. Living near him is his war-time colleague and assistant, Hamza. Between them, Ali Beg and Hamza provided most of the information in this book about the Kazaks' long struggle against the Communists, in which they have played a leading part during most of their lives. I offer them my grateful thanks and my profound admiration as well as my sincere apologies if I have misunderstood them, or inadvertently misrepresented their views. And may I, at this point, also pay tribute to the English friend who accompanied me to Turkey and who acted as an interpreter in more ways than one, and to Douglas Carruthers, Gold Medallist of the Royal Geographical Society, who so generously placed his unrivalled geographical knowledge of Central Asia and his unique collection of photographs at my disposal. Finally, thanks are due to Hassan, Ali Beg's son for much useful work as a translator.

Ali Beg, in the days of his prosperity, had three large tents, one for each of his wives. All were made of the felted hair of his own sheep and, because he was chief, they were white instead of black or brown or grey like those of most of his followers. When he moved from his winter to his summer quarters and back again in the autumn, each tent was taken apart and each section, weighing well over a hundredweight, was rolled round its wooden framework and laid on the back of a camel or an ox. There were ten or twelve sections to each tent and, when all the sections were laced together with broad embroidered strips of webbing, the circular space they enclosed measured some thirty feet across. In the middle, under the round aperture through which the smoke escaped, was a great iron pot which five or even six men could only just hoist on to the back of Ali Beg's strongest camel. In those days, Ali Beg was a "ming-bashi," or ruler of a thousand families, and the tally of his own personal flocks and herds ran into five figures. The group of which he was the head, owned and tended about three hundred thousand sheep, fourteen to fifteen thousand mixed cattle, nine to ten thousand milch cows and, perhaps, a thousand camels besides horses enough and to spare for every man and woman, boy and girl.

Ali Beg and Hamza were near neighbours in their original homes. Seeing Hamza for the first time, one would not think that he is a veteran of no less than a hundred and sixteen hand-to-hand battles against his people's enemies. He is still only thirty-three but first went to war at the age of ten, by the side of his eldest brother, Yunus Hajji, who was more than twenty years his senior. Physically, he is a little smaller than Ali Beg but mentally he is alert enough to have reached the equivalent rank of Colonel by the time he was twenty.

In their own land of East Turkistan, Ali Beg, Hamza and their followers ate mostly curds and cheese during the summer and flesh during the winter, as well as bread throughout the year. Kazak housewives pride themselves on their skill in preparing milk products of which they know at least twenty-six varieties, from the hard, almost stone-like, sheep's cheeses which they chew as appetisers before a feast, to the "koumiss," or fermented whey, skinfuls of which are carried on a journey and also drunk on festive occasions.

Koumiss is most prized when made from mares' milk. But usually it is prepared from the milk of any animals that happen to be able to supply it when it is needed. In pre-Com-munist days, it would have been a very poor Kazak family which did not have at least one skinful of koumiss hanging on a hand-embroidered strip of webbing inside the tent. A stick, shaped like a small paddle, protruded from the mouth of the skin, and every time a member of the household passed, she or he moved the paddle vigorously up and down to promote proper fermentation.

Another of the refugees in Turkey who deserves special mention is the man who first told me about Osman Batur of the Altai Mountains. His comrades call him Karamullah—Kara-mullah the Bard. Just before I met him, Karamullah composed an epic poem in honour of Osman the Hero and we invited him to record it on our little portable tape-recorder in a hotel dormitory-bedroom at Develi, the small market town in the very heart of Turkey—four hundred miles from the settlement at Salihli—where there is another batch of Kazak refugees, totalling altogether some seven to eight hundred people.

Karamullah sang part of his saga, intoned part and spoke the rest. The setting in which he did so was about as incongruous as it could possibly be. At home in East Turkistan, Karamullah would have been seated in the place of honour in the chieftain's tent with the great cooking-pot simmering gently on the cow-dung or wood fire and the acrid smoke swirling gently towards the top of the felted tent before escaping into the keen night air through the aperture at the top. Every now and again, the tent flap would have been lifted and men and women, boys and girls, would have slipped in, each to the humbler or grander place appropriate to their social position and each leaving their outer shoes, which they call caloshes, just inside the threshold. Then they would have seated themselves to listen cross-legged, silent and wide-eyed on the cushions and mats and lovely home-woven carpets which lay on the felt-covered earth all round the central fire.

Karamullah's audience at Develi consisted of half a dozen Kazaks, refugees like himself and clad, like him, in shapeless and nondescript European clothes, the gift of Turkish sympathisers. In addition, there were a Turkish doctor of philosophy, a Turkish lady professor of linguistics, her husband who is a lecturer at the same university as his wife, their joint assistant, my Kazak-speaking colleague from England who was operating the recorder, and myself. Instead of the silent tent-flap there was a wooden door which creaked raspingly on its hinges as people came in or went out. Every now and then a lorry snorted noisily past the window, or a cock started to crow, and we heard all these extraneous noises reproduced much too faithfully when we played the tape back for Karamullah and his friends to hear.

In their summer homes in East Turkistan, the Kazak encampments were too far away from the roads to be plagued by back-firing lorries, though in later days these contraptions often passed their winter quarters. Generally they were Russian Communist ones filled with loot from East Turkistan—or tribute, if you prefer: live animals and wheat requisitioned from the owners without payment, or, perhaps, gold and wolfram won by forced labourers from the bountiful deposits in the Altai.

The song that Karamullah sang about Osman Batur was filled—like all Kazak poetry—with incomprehensible allusions to ancient history and legend which the rest of us could not understand. There was one line, for example, about "He who wears the Golden Caftan" over which I pondered for a long while. Then, a few weeks later, when I was visiting a museum at Konya containing relics of the Moslem sect known as the Whirling Dervishes, near which another group of Kazak refugees was to settle shortly, I noticed that the founder of the sect six or seven hundred years ago used to wear a Caftan, or special shirt, over his cuirass, which was supposed to protect him from the weapons of his enemies. Unfortunately Osman's caftan, if he ever wore one, did not possess that virtue. He certainly bore a charmed life for many years. But the Communists captured him in the end and he is dead.

Though it is only five years since Osman Batur died, legends about him are already current among the Kazaks and we may be sure they are being told secretly today in many Kazak households behind the Iron Curtain. His admirers have even named an era for him, speaking of "the 40th year of Osman Batur," as we would say, A.D. 1939, the year the second World War started. Nevertheless, some of the refugees chaffed Karamullah about his saga, accusing him of having credited the Hero with feats of arms and of courage which were really performed by others. Some of these feats appear in this story and, if I have mistakenly attributed them to the wrong man, there is nevertheless, ample testimony that they were actually performed. They do, therefore, rightly belong to the great Kazak epic which is a much bigger thing than the exploits of any single individual because it is the story of a whole nation.

When a bard sang his songs, he sometimes accompanied himself on the dumbri, which is a long wooden instrument rather like a guitar but with only two strings. Plucked by the fingers of a master, like Karamullah, each string of a dumbri often seems, though I cannot understand how, to be producing two notes at once, and in such hands each note always sings on sturdily till the next plucking of the string. I heard it played a number of times at Develi, sometimes very well and sometimes indifferently. There was one particularly enchanting little air which Karamullah played—plaintive and sweet and nostalgic. He said it came from the Altai but he did not tell me its name.

Most Kazaks can play the dumbri and most of those we met in Turkey could not only sing but write their own words to the music. We brought back recordings of several newly composed songs of this type, set to traditional airs which date back many hundreds of years. But more often than not the words were written by those who sang to us—men like Karamullah ; two of Ali Beg's three wives; boys and girls from fifteen to seventeen years old. We also brought one air from Salihli played on a curious instrument known as the Sibizka, a plain hollow pipe with three holes in it. The player inserted his tongue into the top of the pipe to form a kind of mouthpiece and while playing the air at one side of his mouth, droned out a bagpipe-like accompaniment from the other. In this mysterious fashion he produced a perfectly lovely and most unusual melody which represented the flowing of the Kara-—Black—Irtysh, the great river which rises in the Altai Mountains and flows right across the wide steppes of Soviet Kazakstan and Siberia where it joins the river Ob on its way to the Arctic.

So far as I know, all the Kazak music recorded for us in Develi and Salihli is new to the free world except possibly one song which the Russian Army used as a marching song during the war. Among the others is one called The Flight of the Heron, which was sung by Kadisha and Mulia, two of Ali Beg's wives. Herons are birds of doom to the Kazaks so the song is a sad one. So, unhappily, is the Lament sung for us by a little girl of ten or thereabouts to commemorate her father who had just died. Yerim Tau—The Mountains of my Country— is a nostalgic composition which brings in the Kazak names of all the loved peaks of East Turkistan. Another song which Mulia sang into the microphone is called Gone with the Wind, but of course it has no connection with the book of that name. Karamullah and some of his friends rendered the Schoolboys' Song, which begins with the line: "In the name of God I bring you learning." The airs of the songs called This Changing World and O World, were probably composed about the time of Henry VIII but the words were written specially for our benefit. I must confess that I am rather sorry the Kazaks are so fond of writing new words or verses for their traditional music. No doubt it is good for their imagination. But it means that the old ballads based on the exploits of their past heroes tend only too often to disappear.

After Karamullah the Bard had recorded his saga, I asked him to write it down in the Arabic script which the Kazaks normally use and then invited him and his friends to lunch. If I had been his guest in his tent in the Altai Mountains we would all have dipped die fingers of our right hands into the dish—and burnt them in the process if we were unused to eating Kazak fashion. But at Develi we all used knives and forks and the Turkish restaurant proprietor brought us the food plateful by plateful. When we had finished, Hussein Tajji who was sitting on one side of Karamullah—I was on the other—began to poke fun at the Bard. Karamullah bore it silently, evidently enjoying it as much as anybody, till we rallied him for not answering back- Then he said quietly:

"I would pay him three times over if only he would lend me his hat."

This was a huge cowboy's ten-galloner which sat strangely on Hussein Tajji's thin mongol-type face with its grey-blue eyes and its short sparse dark beard which is still without a white hair though he is over sixty.

Karamullah is a younger man than Hussein Tajji by at least ten years. But, unlike his friend, he has lost all his front teeth as a result of his privations. No doubt his real name is not Karamullah, which means Black Priest, but Kerim-ullah, Bounty of God. Whether he got his nickname because of his unusually swarthy complexion or because, being really a mullah, he is reputed to have a knowledge of the black arts, I cannot say. But, being a sincere Moslem, he would certainly not wish to be regarded as a dabbler in necromancy though some Kazak pseudo-mullahs used to practise it, in emulation, no doubt, of the Mongol priests who, being of another faith, have no such qualms.

Hussein Tajji, as we shall see in due course, left his original home at Barkul under Communist pressure more than twenty years ago and settled near a lake called Gezkul which he pronounces: Gaz-cool. The second syllable actually means "lake," and the first represents the distance from the fingertips to the forearm, and also a ruler. So every Kazak, without seeing it, would know that Gezkul is a long, narrow, straight stretch of water shaped like a ruler. Most Kazak names are descriptive and self-explanatory to those who understand their tongue. The one I like best is Twittering Bird Valley. But such names have one big disadvantage. They tend to recur in all sorts of different localities many miles apart causing confusion in these days of rapid travel though mattering less to nomads who normally revolve in a small orbit.

When Hussein Tajji was living in his felted tents in Barkul and Gezkul with his wives and children and retainers, he had a friend who lived near him named Sultan Sherif. I met Sultan Sherif while he was still in the "hospitality centre" near Istanbul where the Turkish Government houses the Kazak refugees before settling them on the land.

I was introduced to him by another refugee from East Turkistan, Mohammed Emin Bugra, who now has a lovely house of his own on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus opposite Istanbul. Mohammed Emin is not a Kazak but a Turki, most of whom are farmers or merchants who have lived in East Turkistan as long as the Kazaks and are far more numerous. But Mohammed Emin's father was Emir or Prince, of Khotan, and he himself was at one time Deputy Chairman of the provincial Government of Sinkiang as the Chinese call East Turkistan. He managed to escape to Kashmir just before the Communists regained control of the Government of the Province in 1949. He knows, to his cost, the political intrigues which led to their doing so, and which play their part in the story of Kazak resistance.

Ali Beg, Hamza, Karamullah, Hussein Tajji, Sultan Sherif and Mohammed Emin are still alive. The rest of those who took a leading part in the struggle to save East Turkistan and whose names and actions are written in this book, and in the hearts of their compatriots are, almost without exception, dead.

CHAPTER I

Birth of a Hero

Birth and death happen too frequently in and all around the Kazak felted tents to call for either comment or the making of a written record. It is in the nature of things that lambs, calves, camel colts, and the foals of mares should arrive punctually, time after time, in their proper season. Children arrive just as naturally and almost as punctually, though at any season of the year. For a while the children, like the young animals, are the objects of special parental care and loving devotion. But parents have much work to do in a pastoral community. So the young are left more and more to then- own devices and soon launch out into a succession of experiments in which frequent errors yield unforgettable lessons and instil in the young a healthy and watchful attention to the behaviour of their elders.

Thus it is that in the Kazak tents, a record is kept of annual festivals and fasts, such as Courban Id and Ramadan, but not often of such commonplace events as birthdays. So there was no one among the Kazak refugees in Turkey who could tell me on what day, or even in which month, Osman Batur was born, though all of them knew the year. His father and mother are long dead. His three brothers and his sister— if any of them are still alive, which is unlikely—would not know, for he was the firstborn. His friends declare that he never talked about the matter himself and the event was not recorded in a registry of births for there were no such things in this distant part of the Chinese Empire. All we know is that he was born in 1899, the year the Boer War started.

Osman's father, Islam Bai, was not merely a herder and breeder of animals but also, and rather exceptionally, a "dry" farmer who lived in the Kuk Togai district of the Altai not far from where the Russian, Chinese and Mongolian jurisdictions meet. As a "dry" farmer, Islam Bai was free to go where he listed while the crop was growing instead of being tied to his plot by the need of irrigating it like the "wet" farmers in the plains who depended on irrigation.

So, each spring, Islam Bai broadcast ears of wheat over the land after he had scratched its surface with an iron-tipped plough drawn by a team of his own cattle. Then he betook himself with his family and felted tents, his flock and his herds and his servants up into the alpine pastures of the Altai, leaving the seed to the winds and rain and sun and the will of God to fructify and ripen against the time when he would return to see what there was to harvest.

In 1899, therefore, he and his wives, one of them being great with child, pitched their tents as usual in the Altai Mountains as Abram did in the hills which afterwards became the hills of Judaea. We do not know exactly where their encampment was but it may well have been in the Tokuz Tarau—the Valley of the Nine-Toothed Comb—a meeting place of streamlets bubbling down from nine clefts in the towering hills and bringing ice-cold water from the upper Altai into the broad valleys of mingled forest land and pastures where Islam Bai's group of about one hundred families lived throughout each summer.

There are many valleys named Tokuz Tarau in East Turki-stan just as there are many lakes called Kuk Su or Blue Sea, and Kizil Uzun or Red Stream. There is also one Pass of the Venerable Wind—which the Chinese call Lao Feng-kou. The Pass of the Venerable Wind carries one of the three main roads from Soviet Kazakstan to Urumchi the capital of the Chinese province of Sinkiang. In the days of the first pro-Soviet Governor of the province, Chin Shu-jen, a lorry carrying Chinese soldiers broke down at the top of the Pass and, while the driver was trying to find the cause of the trouble, the Venerable Wind piled snow upon him and upon the lorry and its occupants and froze all to death. The bodies were not recovered till the snows melted several months later. Legend says that the Pass of the Venerable Wind has often done worse things than that and declares it to be capable of such feats as blowing whole caravans into the lake which lies below it.

Presently the time came for Islam Bai's wife to be delivered. When her pains began, she sent a servant with a message to her mother, who rode over from her encampment in a nearby valley, stretched a rope tautly across the inside of Islam Bai's tent, which she called an "aool," and told her daughter to kneel in front of it, putting her two arms over the rope up to the armpits, and then to relax and press forward alternatively with her body. As the pains grew more intense, the mother fetched a lambskin bottle and gave it to her daughter to hold, telling her to blow into it strongly each time she pressed forward. Finally, when the mother saw that the time was near, she asked Islam Bai to give her some pieces of rough felt and placed them under her daughter as the girl half-rose from her knees while pressing on the rope. After he had brought them, the mother told Islam Bai he was no longer wanted and beckoned him to leave the tent till the child was born.

So Islam Bai waited outside until a tiny shrill cry mingled with the murmuring of the north wind in the forest trees; drowned the chattering of the stream as it gossiped with the pebbles, and finally faded away amid the bleatings and lowings and the bells of his animals. When Islam Bai heard it, he lifted the flap of his tent, tapping each of the heels of his caloshes off in turn against the toe of the other foot in order that he should not soil the carpets of his aool when he entered. As he went in, he stooped low lest he should bring ill-luck upon his household by touching the wooden frame of the opening, and he stepped wide and high for the same reason lest he should stumble over the threshold.

Inside, Islam Bai looked inquiringly at his mother-in-law who nodded her head to show that all was well. Then he said to his wife:

"How shall we name the child? Shall we leave the decision to God and name him after the first living creature, whatsoever it be, that my eyes light upon when I go outside the tent? Or shall we choose a name for him ourselves out of the Holy Koran?"

Islam Bai's wife knew what to answer for she and her husband had discussed the matter very often in the days before her time came. She chose the second method and the child was called Osman. The other name by which his fellow-country-men came to know his Batur—Hero—did not become his till 1942 when they awarded it to him by acclamation and gave him the Liberation Medal at the same time. Nevertheless, in his infancy, his mother often used to gather him in her arms and say to him after he had fallen and hurt himself: "There! There! Batur! Batur! Don't cry! Be a hero!"

As soon as Osman had received his name, Islam Bai, in accordance with custom, went outside his tent again and killed a sheep. He first took the entrails to his wife's mother who seethed them in milk to make a thick broth with which to nourish her daughter's body and fill her breasts with milk. Afterwards, when he had skinned the carcase, his mother-in-law cut it up and simmered it in the great iron pot which stood over the fire in the centre of the tent. Until his wife had consumed the whole carcase her sole duty in the tent was to nurse her baby.

After Osman's grandmother had washed the little boy all over in warm water from the great copper kettle which took its turn with the seething pot on the iron tripod over the fire, she dried him with a cotton cloth and then encased his tiny body in a single garment of thickly-wadded cotton quilting which had a wide open slit up the back. She then placed him in a wooden rocking cot with pieces of soft felt under him which were afterwards either washed or burnt as was appropriate. Except when he was being nursed, Osman lay in his rocking cot all the time until he was big enough to learn to crawl. And long after he had reached the crawling stage, his arms were always bound to his side when he was lying in his cot. If you had asked his mother why she did not want him to suck his thumb, or lie with his arms over his head, she would have replied, rather pityingly, that it was well known that a child slept more peacefully with its hands by its side and that putting its hands over its head was liable to cause convulsions. And if you had suggested to her that it might like a dummy, she would have been really horrified.

Whether she was right or wrong about such matters, Osman grew and nourished. His mother's milk was ample so that he did not have to be held between the hind legs of a nanny goat to supplement it. Indeed, his mother went on suckling him for more than two years believing, though mistakenly as it turned out, that she would not conceive again while she was doing so. As soon as his first teeth showed through his gums, she gave him a mutton bone to gnaw and he had a crust of bread as soon as his fingers were able to close round it. As he grew older, he drank cows' milk and goats' milk from his eating bowl which his mother held to his lips as he sat on her lap. Sometimes his mother, but more often his father, gave him a piece of sugar broken off with a knife from the great cone-shaped loaf which Islam Bai had bought from an itinerant Chinese merchant, but which actually came from Tsarist Russia.

When Osman started to crawl, he was left just as much to his own devices as when he had been lying in his cot. His mother was too busy doing her share of the household chores to watch over him, and his father spent most of his days out of doors, generally with his animals, but sometimes hunting either with his shotgun or, more often, especially in winter, with his hunting eagle. Occasionally he went away for two or three days. So Osman, like all Kazak children, had to fend for himself, getting into, and out of, mischief and danger as best he could. Perhaps his parents believed that the amulet which the Mullah placed round his neck soon after he was born would protect him. The amulet was made of two pieces of cloth sewn together and contained his name and a verse from the Koran. It was tied on with string and Osman wore it all his life. It would normally have been buried with him, but the Communists who killed him severed his head from his body and did not bury either part.

While teaching himself to stand upright and walk, Osman's greatest danger was from the open fire which burnt continuously in the centre of the aool, and from the iron cauldron, or the kettle, hanging over it. If his unsteady footsteps had made him lurch against the tripod, or seek to save himself from falling by grasping the vessel on the fire, he might have been scalded or burnt, even to death, as indeed happened to some of the other children of Islam Bai's group. But the amulet, or Providence, though not his parents who were too busy, watched over him.

One other precaution Osman's mother took as soon as he could walk beyond the tent door. That was to tuck a crust of bread securely into his coat in front of his heart so that he would not starve to death if he wandered beyond the encampment and could not find his way back. For the same reason, his sister had a little tied-on bag filled with parched corn. Even in Turkey today, the Kazak mothers observe this ancient custom. Parched corn has been the nomad's "iron ration" at least since the days when Jesse sent David with an ephah of parched corn for his three brothers who were fighting in Saul's army against the Philistines, and ten cheeses for the captain of their thousand.

The first thing that Osman did as soon as he could toddle out of his mother's tent was to make friends with the dogs which slept under its lee and gave warning when a stranger was approaching. I think his father and mother would have stopped him if they had noticed. Dogs, according to the Moslem law, are unclean, and for good reason in that part of the world seeing that for countless generations they have been the only disposers of camp refuse and ordure. But Osman's parents had their work to do, so they were generally not there to see the dogs, having finished scavenging, come and lick Osman's face when he held out his arms to them.

Soon Osman was wandering further afield to where some of his father's lambs and sheep were tethered. Sometimes he went simply to play with them. Sometimes his parents sent him to take them their food. Before long, he was climbing on to their backs. If he fell off, he laughed or cried and climbed up again.

However, long before Osman was able to do such things as these, summer was beginning to wane and it was time for Islam Bai to leave the Valley of the Nine-Toothed Comb to see whether God had caused his crops in the Kara Irtysh valley to prosper during the sower's absence. In a good year, Islam Bai could expect to harvest one-hundred-fold, and more, from the short stocky Altai wheat, though its straw is seldom more than a foot high. In a bad year, he would have to sell animals in the market and buy grain from the millers in the towns to whom he generally took his grain to be ground into flour unless, as is possible, he owned one of the rare water-mills which Kazaks have erected in some places.

Eager, no doubt, to see what God had provided in that first year of Osman Batur, Islam Bai and his wives and their servants took down the felted tents, slipping the simple knots in the strips of webbing which held the felt taut against the trellised wooden framework. Then they removed the upper poles from their niches in the trellis beneath and the circular frames which held the poles together, rolling the half-inch-thick pieces of felt round the trellis and tying them into neat bundles with the webbing. Meanwhile, the women were making sure that the great metal-bound wooden chests in which the nomad families carried their bedding, their carpets, their ceremonial clothes, their documents and their books, among which was a copy of the Koran, were securely fastened and made as waterproof as possible in case they should fall into the water when the animals which carried them were crossing a stream. The cauldron, too, which weighed the best part of a hundred and fifty pounds, had to be hoisted on to the camel which Islam Bai himself had carefully chosen as the fittest to bear such a burden. Finally, Osman's cot, with Osman himself securely strapped inside it, was lashed between the humps of another camel, though sometimes his mother carried him in a cloth sling on her breast.

The rest of the family's belongings were divided between the other animals: camels, cattle, sheep, goats, and horses, each being laden according to its strength. Then, when everything had been done—and it generally took about one hour to break camp when there was no need for haste—Islam Bai, his wives and servants mounted their riding horses and the cavalcade started. How many of the other families in Islam Bai's group accompanied them, I cannot say; none unless they, too, were "dry" farmers. Those whose sole occupation was to tend their flocks stayed in the Valley of the Nine-Toothed Comb till the winds of late autumn and the early prospect of frost and snow told them it was time to follow Islam Bai to their usual winter quarters.

No doubt, some of Islam Bai's personal followers and servants also stayed in the upper valley to care for the beasts he left behind. When his herdsmen brought their charges down in due time, Islam Bai, following the ancient Kazak custom, did not count them; he asked instead:

"Where is the black ewe with the white forehoof? And the dun cow with the up-pointed right horn? And the ring-streaked and spotted she-goat?"

His servants replied:

"The ewe was taken by a wolf and the cow put her left fore-hoof into a cleft between two rocks, breaking the bone so that we had to slay her. As for the ring-streaked and spotted she-goat, she was a grisly animal so, when we needed meat, we chose her for the slaying."

If Islam Bai believed what his servants told him, he answered:

"It is the will of God!" But if he did not, he said: "We will go into that later." Then there might be a quarrel and blows and perhaps the dispute came in the end before the Kazi, or judge, of the group for settlement.

As Osman grew bigger, his wanderings became correspondingly more adventurous. He had few toys and maybe none at all, except a knife, which was much more to him than a toy. But he was soon galloping around the encampment, riding a stick. Sometimes he linked his arms round a playmate's middle and they galloped together. Such games generally ended with a bout of wrestling, half of it fun and the other half a trial of strength and skill by which the boys established their standing among themselves. Osman, whose father was a Djuz-bashi, or ruler of a hundred families, had also a certain position by virtue of ancestry. But Osman's main claim to obedience and respect, especially after he reached his 'teens, lay in his own personality. It is said of him in this connection that from his early youth, he was universally regarded as exceptional.

Like all Kazak children, Osman was brought up the hard way. In his father's tent where he ate and spent much time— he slept in the tent which belonged to his mother—he had few rights except to listen and obey instantly if his father gave him an order. If he ever forgot himself when excited and let his tongue betray him into speaking without being spoken to, his father might reach for his riding whip which hung with the family's bridles and saddles on the left side of die tent door.

More often, however, he called to the boy's mother and said:

"Woman! It seems that a pig, or maybe a dog, was hanging round my aool while I was out tending my flocks about nine months before this thy son was born. Otherwise, whence can have come his beastly manners, speaking when he has not received permission?"

On such occasions, Osman went to bed without his supper as, indeed, other little boys used to do nearly fifty years ago whose homes were built of bricks and mortar instead of felt, and who slept on iron bedsteads with mattresses instead of on three or four layers of quilt laid on the bare earth in the humblest place in the tent nearest the door.

In spite of such corrections, we are told that Osman loved and respected his father who taught him many things as they rode or walked together in the mountains. On such occasions Osman could ask freely whatever questions he liked. Most of them, naturally, were about animals. He soon learned to recognise all the wild beasts with which the Kazaks shared the unenclosed land, as our own ancestors shared theirs before the village common land became private property.

When Osman was nine or seven or five—we know for certain only that it was not when he was eight or six or four— the Mullah was asked to come and circumcise him. Afterwards there was a great feast to celebrate the passing of this first milestone in the child's life. Another milestone was reached when he was eight and his father sent him to the Kazak tent school. Like the tent in which Osman lived, the school tent was called simply "Aool." So, to distinguish the one from the other I shall spell the school tent with a capital A though there are no capital letters in the Arabic script, which the Kazaks normally used.

The Aool which Osman attended was the usual communal affair maintained by the group of which Islam Bai was the head. It had no furniture except some mats on the ground and there was a bare minimum of equipment. Almost every Kazak encampment had one lest the children should have to go to a school maintained by the Chinese, where the teaching would be in the Chinese tongue and the teachers themselves would not be Moslems. This attitude was shared not only by the Kazaks but by all the other racial groups in East Turkistan— Turkis, Mongols, Kirghiz, Tartars, Uzbeks—from whom the Kazaks have generally held aloof, especially since the beginning of the twentieth century.

So Osman, at the age of eight, went to the Aool where the Mullah who had circumcised him, and who combined the offices of priest and schoolmaster, taught him first to repeat verses from the Koran, which is in Arabic, and then how to understand, read and write them. Later, the children learned other things: the history of Genghis Khan and Attila and other more recent Kazak heroes such as Boko Batur who was still very much alive. Then there was arithmetic, geography and, most important of all, how to write poetry and recite it. Many of the old songs and poems in which the history of the past was enshrined had innumerable verses and Osman and his fellow-pupils often used to be made to repeat alternate ones in their tents in the evening while their parents listened, prompted perhaps and, finally, applauded the one who was able to go on the longest. Girls were often better than boys at memorising, but Osman almost always out-remembered even the girls.

Almost from the beginning of their schooling, the children learned to set their own words to the old music the Kazaks love. The new verses are always full of allusions to older ones and to the customs of a bygone age which makes them hard to understand. But while I listened to Kazak boys and girls in Turkey singing songs with words they had written themselves, I often found myself wondering how boys and girls at home would get on if they were called upon to do the same thing with, let us say, Elizabethan music; or any music, if it comes to that.

One of the first songs Osman and his fellow students learnt was the Schoolboys' Song in which the scholars declare:

"In the name of God, we greet you, O Doctor, Not one wrong word is found in your teaching, Not one wrong word in your students' mouths."

The Mullah who taught Osman was a stern task-master but Osman himself was an eager pupil. Soon he could sing a song, and write a poem, as well as ride a horse, better than anyone else—adult or adolescent—in the little group of families which voluntarily accepted Islam Bai's leadership. His fame in these directions was spread to other Kazak communities in the Altai by wandering bards, like Karamullah, and by the frequent guests to whom Islam Bai dispensed hospitality. Before long, he became known throughout the region as a "spiritual" boy, an unusual description in the mouths of tent-dwellers whose lives were spent in animal husbandry and who had no knowledge of, nor interest in, metaphysics except insofar as their innate and unspoken determination to preserve their traditional way of life had a metaphysical foundation. But the word, spiritual, was used deliberately by almost all Osman's former comrades in Turkey. I think that when they used it, they were referring to such things as his love for the Kazak way of life, his respectful devotion to his parents, his protective care for his own family and those dependent upon him, and also his capacity to inspire confidence among his followers. Perhaps, too, they included the ruthless hatred he felt for his people's enemies—first, in point of time, the Chinese but first in point of intensity, the Communists, whether Chinese or Russian, who did not merely seek to milk them like cows and sheep as the Chinese nationalists had done, but to kill their individuality.

But, in his youth, Osman's hatred was only for the Chinese because there were no Communists in those days. He used to listen eagerly to the tales of Kazak heroes who had fought the Chinese in the past and, as is always the way with patriotic songs and stories, defeated them. I am sure that Osman used to dream of emulating these heroes.

One day when Osman was eleven or twelve, there was a stir outside his father's tent and one of Osman's younger brothers, knowing that for once he could interrupt his elders without risking reproof, rushed in shouting: "Boko Batur is coming! Boko Batur is coming!"

"How knowest thou that it is Boko Batur, noisy one, having never seen him?" asked Islam Bai.

"It is his horse—the one of which we have heard tell at story time—jet black without a white hair on its body. And the rider is wearing Boko Batur's plum-coloured tumak on his head with the Kirei owl's feather floating in the air above it. And there are a score of armed men riding behind him. Who but Boko Batur would come thus attended, yet in peace?"

The tent watchdogs were barking loudly by this time, so Islam Bai rose to his feet while his wives rummaged hastily in the metal-bound wooden chests for their husband's ceremonial tumak and long embroidered brocade gown and for their own best head-dresses.

As soon as Islam Bai was suitably arrayed, he strode to the tent door and held the flap wide open, saying as he did so:

"Enter, O welcome one. Thy coming strengthens us."

Then he waited for Boko Batur to dismount.

CHAPTER II

Osman leaves Home

When a guest arrived at a Kazak tent forty years ago, and, indeed, until the Communists decided that the past was only fit to be destroyed, he was always accorded the traditional reception which still remained much the same as in the days before history began and exactly the same as it has been since the Kazaks were converted to Islam between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. Consequently, though there is no actual record of Boko Batur's entertainment in the tent of Islam Bai, we can reconstruct the scene without difficulty.

"Salaam aleikum—Peace be with you," said Boko Batur, as he stooped to enter the tent, lifting his feet carefully to avoid touching the threshold and taking care that his long coat should not brush against the doorposts as he stepped inside. Then he tapped off his caloshes, one foot against the other, leaving them by the door before entering the main part of the tent.

"And on you peace," Islam Bai answered, taking Boko Batur's out-stretched hand, first in his right hand and then in both. After that, the two men touched their own foreheads, lips and breasts with their right hands before sitting down together facing the door. Altogether, sixteen conventional greetings were exchanged and when host and guest had finished exchanging them with one another and their respective male personal attendants, all squatted down in a circle around the fire in the correct order of precedence, after which each one placed his two hands together, palms upward, and muttered a prayer from the Koran. Finally all repeated together the words: "Allahu akbar!—God is great!" As they spoke them, they raised their hands with a sweeping movement which ended with stroking their beards.

"The presence of such a guest gives us courage," Islam Bai remarked when they had finished. "Here, imp of Satan," he went on in a different tone, turning to Osman who was standing just behind him. "The lad has no manners or he would know that a son greets his father's guests as befits them."

Osman did know. He also knew that his father's reproof was no more than a figure of speech. But he came forward rather timidly all the same for Boko Batur was a famous figure of whose deeds he had heard almost every day since he could understand what was said around him. Nevertheless, he looked Boko Batur in the eyes without blinking and greeted the guest in the same way that his father had done though when he said: "Allahu akbar!" his voice was almost inaudible.

"This, no doubt, is the lad of whom I have heard speak in the tents of my friends," said Boko Batur, keeping hold of Osman's left hand and pulling him forward so that he could look at him. "It is said of him that he has strength and wisdom far beyond his years and that he is destined for a great future."

"The boy is a fool," replied his father. "A good-for-nothing, a scamp. Run away, idiot, and see to our guest's horse."

"Is not such a guest," Osman boldly pleaded, "of much more importance than even the horse of such a one? May I not stay and see that the stallion's master lacks nothing?"

"O my life!" boomed Boko Batur. "Didst hear what the lad said? Wai! Wai! And he is not yet a stripling!"

"Guests are in the care of fathers," Islam Bai declared. "Little lads, like this saucy one, have lowlier tasks. And it is meet that they should do as they are bid."

So Osman, knowing that his father's apparent chiding hid approval, and well-pleased with Boko Batur's exclamations, ran out of the tent to take charge of the big black stallion.

He found that one of Boko Batur's servants was leading it up and down in accordance with the invariable Kazak custom, in case its legs should stiffen after it had been ridden for a long period. So Osman took the reins from the servant and then, greatly daring, climbed up into the saddle.

"Wa yapramai!" ejaculated the groom who was standing nearby. "It is a miracle! The master's beast throws him not. Never before have I seen it brook another rider. Verily the lad is destined to be a leader of men as well as a rider of proud horses."

Hearing his servant's exclamation from within the tent, Boko Batur came to the tent door.

"Ah ha!" he called. "So thou wouldst ride mine own beast, audacious one."

"I thought but to cool him down before watering and feeding him," said Osman timidly.

"It is well that he did not bite thy backside when thy foot touched the stirrup," laughed Boko Batur. "That he did not, is a sign that I did right to come."

"May I ride him now to the watering and feeding?" asked Osman a little more boldly.

"Verily, nay," replied Boko Batur loudly, with perhaps a covert glance over his shoulder to make sure that his host was listening. "Water him not and feed him not, for I must be away before nightfall."

"Nay! Nay!" expostulated Islam Bai in a horrified voice. "To depart so soon would shame my hospitality. . . Wife!" he called over his shoulder: "Bring swiftly the tea and bread, for our guest is discomfited by its being delayed. Bring it, I say, lest we be shamed by his departure."

So Islam Bai's Baibicha, or Chief Wife, brought copper bowls filled with salted tea and slices of the traditional salted bread, in a cloth knotted at the four corners, like the cloth filled with all manner of beasts for food which Peter saw in his vision being let down to him from Heaven. And, seeing it, Boko Batur suffered himself to be led back into the tent where he sat down again in his appointed place of honour and made ready to eat, protesting as he did so that he was not worthy. But he took the bowl of tea from the hands of Islam Bai's wife and drank it, sucking the liquid in noisily through his teeth and, between gulps, soaking pieces of the hard bread before putting it into his mouth.

"May I now bid Osman water and feed the stallion?" Islam Bai asked when Boko Batur had broken bread and drunk tea as custom prescribed. "For it is ordained that when a horse's labours for the day are ended, he shall be watered and then fed so that his strength shall return for the tasks of the following day."

"The bounty of such a host is beyond praise," murmured Boko Batur.

"And if it be convenient, let the flock now be inspected so that a beast may be slain and my women make ready the evening meal," Islam Bai went on.

"Naught should be killed for this wanderer," protested Boko Batur. "Did I not say that I must be away before nightfall?"

"And did I not reply that so swift a departure would shame my hospitality?" Islam Bai reminded him. "And it is known that a horse should not be worked after it is watered and fed."

"To shame such a host is to injure oneself," declared Boko Batur, ignoring the remark about his horse. "Be it therefore as is most convenient to the host."

"Boy!" shouted Islam Bai, striding to the tent door. "Give the black stallion water and food seeing that his owner abides here this night. Fetch grain from the sack but lead the beast first to the river so that it may drink fresh water. And while the stallion is being watered and fed, let the pick of the yearling ewe lambs be brought to the door of the tent so that the guest may choose which he shall eat this night."

So Osman took the black stallion to the river, riding it there proudly instead of leading it as his father had said. And Boko Batur's servants marvelled, for the beast had never let them mount it. Nor would they have dared to try. None had been on its back before save Boko Batur only.

Back in the tent, emptied now of Boko Batur's retinue, the guerilla chieftain was still protesting.

"Wa yapramai!" he declared roundly. "No animal should be killed for me. Did not I and my bodyguard eat our fill before I left my encampment at dawn this very day to visit the tent of my friend?"

"Food is for the eating," maintained Islam Bai doggedly. "And the belly for filling. He who fills not the belly when there is opportunity, hungers the more in the days when he must fast."

"Yet it is unworthy in a guest to cause toil to his host's household," Boko Batur replied.

"Better the work," interposed Islam Bai's chief wife, "Better by far than the tears we women would shed if a guest, and one such as this one, should depart with his belly empty or even if it were filled with food which is unworthy of him."

So, finally, Boko Batur suffered himself to be led to the tent door where the sound of many bleatings showed that the yearlings were already assembled.

"Choosing is for the guest," declared Islam Bai. "But Hata-num—my wife—has spoken truly. If a guest in his modesty choose a beast which is not worthy either of himself or his host, then the host is bound to keep his eyes closed until a better choice has been made."

"With such a host," said Boko Batur, not without a glint of satisfaction, "What can a guest do but choose the flower of the flock?"

So saying, he placed his hand on the head of a well-grown ewe lamb which was at once led away to be slaughtered and made ready for the evening meal.

"Choose also for those who came with thee," said Islam Bai. So, because these numbered twenty, Boko Batur placed his hand on three more ewes and, when Islam Bai protested that this was not enough, on the heads of three more. And when the day ended, there was not much left of all the six, for the Kazaks are very hearty eaters.

The changeless laws of hospitality having thus been observed on both sides, Islam Bai led his guest back into the tent and the two men seated themselves again side by side on their cushions on the gaily-coloured home-woven and home-dyed carpets opposite the tent door while the women cut up the yearling and placed it piece by piece to simmer in the great cauldron, keeping the head to be roasted and eaten with rice after the carcase of the beast had been disposed of. Presently Osman came silently in, having finished his task of seeing to the stallion. He seated himself as unobtrusively as possible near the tent door on the other side of the fire but where he could both see and hear his elders without attracting their attention. But he had not been there long before he realised suddenly that he himself was the subject of their conversation.

"There is a boy by the tent door," he heard Boko Batur say. "I would learn what manner of lad he is."

"He is more foolish than most," Osman's father answered. "There are few in this valley who exceed him in folly whether it be playing tricks on horseback, climbing out of the saddle and under the horse's belly and so up again into the saddle on the other side while the beast is at full gallop; or whether it be in swimming across a flooded stream or composing ridiculous verses behind the Mullah's back in the Aool."

"Wai! Wai! All that is foolishness indeed," laughed Boko Batur. "There be many who can climb under a horse's belly at full gallop and some who can snatch a grown sheep from the ground as they ride past it and many who swim and many who write verses. Yet there are few who can do all these things well. . . Come hither, Osman, and seat thyself by me. Now, tell me, what else canst thou do? Canst shoot yet with a gun? Canst strike off the head of a sheep with a single stroke of a sword? How many rings canst thou discern around Saturn or the moons circling Jupiter? . . . Nay, friend," he ended, seeing that Islam Bai was about to answer. "Let the lad speak for himself. Then I shall know whether the tales I have heard about him are truth."

"Such things are better done than spoken of," said Osman. "And how can a boy do them as he should until he has the right teacher?"

"Ya Allah! Though I say it to his father's face, and his own, his like will never be born hereafter. Rumour for once speaks the truth. I would talk more of this matter after we have eaten."

To put these words into Boko Batur's mouth at such an early stage in his friendship with Osman is perhaps to draw a bow at a venture. But it is not a very long bow for it is on record that he used them about Osman on a number of occasions. We also do not know exactly at which of Boko Batur's visits to Islam Bai he made the proposal which follows, though it is quite certain that he made it.

But it is never the Kazak habit to talk of serious matters before dinner, so that after Boko Batur had intimated he had something serious he wished to speak about, the conversation drifted to lighter topics, and Osman, realising that he was no longer wanted, crept silently back to his lowly place by the door. There he sat, trying to listen attentively while his elders, ignoring him completely, talked about their flocks, the hunting, the coming harvest, the affairs of their followers, the news about the inconvenient outside world which was beginning to hem them in. This last topic inevitably turned the conversation round to the Chinese.

"Is it true that the Kitai have put a price on the head of Boko Batur?" Islam Bai asked, taking care to avoid his guest's eyes.

"So I have been told," Boko Batur answered carelessly. "If it be true, it is good. Threatened men always live long."

"How much?"

"I have heard that it is ten thousand taels."

That was about £2,500 at the rates current in 1911, when a horse could be bought in East Turkistan for as little as ten taels.

"It is a lot of money. Has he no fear that someone might betray him for so great a sum?"

Boko Batur laughed.

"My own men would not. They know that the Kitai would pay the money into their hand to fulfil their promise, and then slip a rope round their necks before they reached the door. And no other man, or woman, will have the opportunity to earn the blood money—or, if they have it, will dare to use it."

"How many know where he spends this night?"

Boko Batur looked round carefully before replying in a lowered tone:

"Only those who saw him enter the tent of his blood-brother."

"Hush!" said Islam Bai, looking round in his turn. "It would be an evil day for both of us if an eavesdropper heard us speak of a bond that is secret between our two selves and besides us known only to the Mullah who mingled our bloods in the bowl as we swore the covenant with one another."

"There is one whom I would wish should know of it; and it shall be explained why I wish it later."

"Who is that?"

"The lad who is straining both his ears to hear us, over by the tent door. But let us not speak more of it till we have eaten. When the belly is full, the heart is contented. That is the time to speak to a friend what is in the heart. Words are ever big and boastful when there is overmuch room for them to puff themselves out with wind in the stomach."

Again, the story goes beyond what is actually recorded. But it is unlikely that there would be a definite record that any two men were actually joined in this most sacred of human relationships for, if there were, its usefulness would be destroyed. So far as Boko Batur and Islam Bai are concerned it would have been inconceivable that each did not have a blood-brother. And it is highly unlikely that Boko Batur would have treated Osman in the way he did unless he had stood in that relationship with Osman's father.

Blood-brotherhood is the closest bond between two individuals in the Kazak scheme of things; closer than being born of the same womb; closer far than that of husband to wife which, under Islamic law, can be dissolved by either the man or the woman repeating thrice in the hearing of others, the three simple words: I divorce thee. It is as close, in fact, and very like, the covenant which knit the soul of Jonathan to the soul of David so that Jonathan loved David as his own soul—a threefold bond binding bodies in service one to the other and souls which the Kazaks as Moslems believe will meet in paradise when their bodies are dead and, finally, knitting together the portions God has bestowed upon them of His Spirit which, according to Moslem belief, returns at death to God who gave it.

So we may picture the two men as blood-brothers falling silent while the womenfolk continued their preparations for the meal and letting their thoughts drift back to their youth when the Mullah brought the bowl, made an incision in their two wrists and then bade them repeat after him the words of their covenant. A young cockerel, pinned by the skin of its throat, squawked lustily but without struggling, as the two young men did so, but no-one outside the tent thought anything of it because cockerels often played a similar part when the inmates were reciting the Koran or saying their prayers.

Finally, when the blood-brothers had dipped their thumbs in the bowl and embraced one another, one of them released the cockerel which scuttled away as soon as the tent flap was thrown back and the two men went about their business as though nothing had happened. But from that moment, each, could demand of the other shelter for a night when pursued by his enemies and the best horse to escape on the next day, as well as succour, whatever the risk, when in danger during a battle. And each could also expect the other to tell him the truth without prevarication or holding back, provided no one else was present when the question was asked.

If such were their dreams, there is no doubt that both Boko Batur and his host came out of them when the womenfolk brought steaming bowls filled with the broth and flesh of the yearling and gave it first to Boko and then to Islam Bai. Before they started eating, however, warm water was poured over their hands at die door of the tent, after which all murmured the meal-time prayer. Then huge pieces of flat bread were handed round after which all dipped their right hands into the great dish when they needed more meat and sucked the unseasoned broth from the bowls through their teeth to wash the meat down just as Boko Batur had washed down his bread with the tea when he first arrived. After they had eaten their fill they again washed their hands in water poured over them by one of Islam Bai's servants and wiped them dry on the long cotton towel Islam Bai had spread across their knees before they started to eat. Finally, the servants cleared the remnants of the meal away and took it outside to finish in company with Islam Bai's children, while the women brought in fresh bowls of tea flavoured this time with cinnamon and sugar as well as with salt. As they noisily drew the hot liquid in, they emitted the other more staccato punctuations which Kazak good manners shared with those of Dr. Johnson and his contemporaries as proof that the meal has been both ample and delicious.

"Bring firewood, lazy one," commanded Islam Bai to Osman as the elders settled themselves down on their cushions to relax. "Have I ever to bid thee build up the fire and blow it into flame with the bellows so that we may see? Even a wild beast would know that the evening is upon us and that it grows dark."

So Osman whispered to his brothers and they fetched arms-ful of firewood from the pile behind the tent. While one of them laid it carefully on the cow-dung embers above which the yearling's flesh had been cooked, another blew it vigorously with the bellows till the tent was filled with flickering tongues of flame from which long, fantastic shadows leapt unceasingly, like streaks of darkened lightning, and dashed themselves noiselessly to pieces against the thick felt walls.

Presently Islam Bai considered that the flames were high enough so he called to Osman to cease from feeding them. Boko Batur then called Osman to him and when Osman obeyed and stood respectfully before him he said:

"Sit down here, by my side."

So Osman sat down and waited and there was a long silence. At last Boko Batur placed his hand on the boy's head and said:

"There was talk before we ate that a price has been put on my head: is it not so, O my brother?" he added, turning to Islam Bai.

"There was such talk," Islam Bai agreed.

"Those who are threatened live long, as I have said already, because God causes them to walk warily. But death comes to all when God wills."

"May God forbid that death should come to those who are now with us in this tent," said Islam Bai, "and may none of them die before he be full of years."

And his wives echoed: "May God forbid it."

"It is in the hands of God," Boko Batur commented. "But a wise man, especially if he be the leader of thousands as I am, looks forward and makes his plans lest the day should come unawares when his followers are without a leader. Is not that so, O my brother?"

"It is so."

"Leadership," Boko Batur continued, "is from God and not from man. Nor does it always bless the fruit of a leader's loins. A man's son, and likewise his daughter, may lead his father's clan, and it may be the whole tribe, in times of peace. But to trust the fortunes of war to him unless he be fitted is an offence to God."

"It is God who teaches the mettled stallion to stand before his flock of mares and their foals when danger approaches in the mountains," said Islam Bai.

"It is well said," agreed Boko Batur. "I have no such stallion who would care for my flock if I were taken from it," he went on, turning Osman's face towards him. "Is this lad a stallion of such mettle? What thinkest thou, O father of Osman?"

Islam Bai grinned suddenly and unexpectedly, mischievously even.

"That he is not a gelding I know," he answered. "More than that, it is not for me, his father, to say. Besides, his years are no more than twelve."

"He is old enough to come with me so that I may find out," said Boko Batur.

"What sayest thou, boy?" asked his father.

"If it be my father's will, and Boko Batur's, I will go gladly."

"Listen to what I have to say to thee, for it is not a little thing that we are discussing," said Boko Batur. "Thy father knows well that since the days of Genghis Khan, nay, since the beginning, we Kazaks have roamed these mountains, paying tribute to none and owing allegiance to none, save to God and to our chosen chieftains. Then, from beyond the Gobi desert, came foreign infidels seeking to enslave us. Thy father knows, and our enemies know even better, that I have been fighting a Jehad—Holy War—against the Kitai these twenty years and rousing our people to fight them likewise. One day, we shall drive them back into the desert where they belong and we shall destroy them there though they be as many as the sands of the Takla Makan."

Boko Batur paused for a moment and then went on:

"Thy father, O Osman, is a man of peace and I am one who lives by fighting and who loves it. But we both love our nation, he in his way and I in mine. And more than he loves peace and I, war, we love one another, even since we were lads, like thee. Last night, it came to me as I slept that there was one in this tent who possessed his father's skill in the ways of peace, yet to whom I might teach my skill in the paths of war. Then, when I am gone, the fight could continue under one head instead of two, or many more than two as our way has ever been. And when I awoke, the day was breaking and it was my fancy to come here to see and I came."

Again there was silence for a time and it was Osman's mother who broke it.

"In the days that are to come, they shall call my son 'Batur,' as today another is called by that name. Take him and teach him, and if he be not worthy let him return to his father's tent."

"If I am not found worthy, I shall never return," said Os-man. "I would rather die."

The grown-ups talked far into the night after it was decided that Boko Batur should take Osman with him to be trained as a guerilla leader. Osman, meanwhile, returned modestly to his place among his brothers, replenishing the fire when it needed it, but taking no further part in the conversation. All the pros and cons had to be weighed: especially how to prevent suspicion falling on Islam Bai that his son was fighting the Chinese; how to prevent the Chinese from seizing Islam Bai and torturing him to make him say where Boko Batur was hiding.

Osman listened eagerly and in silence. He heard Boko Batur, and by no means for the last time, voice his searing hatred of the Chinese officials; their exactions, their greed for the gold and other mineral wealth lying beneath the surface of the Kazak homeland, their cruelties to those who fell into their clutches unless such people were rich enough to buy their freedom. Then Boko Batur turned to denounce the extortionate prices charged by the Chinese merchants, the way Chinese immigrants stole the Altai land so that its rightful owners were cooped within ever narrowing boundaries instead of being able to roam freely where they would, none gainsaying them, as their forebears had done since time began.

As Osman listened his heart burned within him. Under Boko Batur's influence he grew to hate the Chinese with a bitterness which deepened as the years passed. When the Chinese danger began to merge into the wider menace of communism in the 1930's, Osman's distrust of Chinese nationalism made him hesitate to ally himself with the nationalists against the Russian and Chinese Communists. From his point of view, the one was as great a danger to the Kazak way of life as the other.

It is hard to criticise him. The Chinese held out no future for their subject races, except to become Chinese. Even forty years later, in June 1952, Dr. Chu Chia-hua, a former Vice-Premier of China could still write from exile in Formosa to the Turki leader, Mohammed Emin Bugra, who by then was a refugee in Istanbul:

"Not only Sinkiang (the Western Dominion) itself lies in China but even much territory beyond once formed part of the Chinese Empire. That is why all the Chinese people consider it as a sacred inheritance. . . The Chinese blood is a mixture of many stocks. . . The concept of One-Family-Under-Heaven is not a mere rhetorical flourish. . . but serves as a criterion of our daily conduct.

"In the Lives of Eminent Monks, there is an interesting account of how Jumolosh, a Sinkiang monk, went to the Court of one of the short-lived kingdoms in the age of the Barbarian invasions and how the king of that period presented him with ten beautiful Chinese maidens in order to perpetuate the best qualities of his mind through their descendants. . . Jumolosh's descendants, if any, by his pretty wives must have been absorbed into Chinese society and formed part of the Chinese stock. . .

"The modern Chinese race is the offspring of many racial elements which accounts for the brilliance of the Chinese civilisation and the continued vigour of the Chinese people. . ."

Mohammed Emin Bugra replied that "the language, religion, script and other characteristics of the Turkic, Mongolian and Tibetan nations now under Chinese domination have nothing in common with the Chinese. . . Turkistan lies beyond the natural boundary of China in a distinct geographical area with ninety-six per cent of its population Turkic.

Consequently it should be independent. . . There are more than eight million Turks made up of Turkis, Kazaks, etc. . . And there are more than ten free nations in the world with less than one million inhabitants and twenty with a population less than that of Turkistan."

That, in brief, is why Osman Batur hated and fought the Chinese. And it is why he, Ali Beg, Hamza and the rest subsequently fought against the Russian and Chinese Communists who sought to destroy their Kazak individuality.

The morning after Boko Batur offered to train Osman as his successor in the holy war, Islam Bai and his family and their guest rose as usual at daybreak for the first prayer of the day, and, an hour or so later, Osman with his sleeping kit tied across his saddle, rode out of the encampment with his new guardian and teacher. He had finished with the Aool and was to learn henceforth in the school of practical experience.

It is not difficult to imagine his feelings. Ever since he could understand grown-up language, he had been hearing about Boko Batur's exploits. The guerilla leader had been the favourite topic of conversation whenever a visitor was entertained in Islam Bai's tent. Wandering bards had sung long ballads they had written in his honour and Osman's schoolmaster, the camp Mullah, had taught Osman himself to write them and then sing them using the same music as the bards, the beloved melodies of the long-distant past.

So, in Osman's eyes, there must have been almost a visible halo round Boko Batur's head, and the sweet savour of dedication to a holy cause in his own nostrils, as they rode together towards the upper Altai valleys. Though we do not know exactly when this was, or where they went, I believe it was already late autumn and that the snow-line was beginning to descend towards the place in which Islam Bai had his winter encampment. But, whenever it was, and wherever they went, it was towards the snow-line, for Boko Batur always chose hiding places deep in the mountains which his enemies would have difficulty in finding.

Soon, therefore, they were riding towards the snow-line, Boko Batur in front, turning their horses' heads this way and that by pressing with the knee and lifting the beasts' heads gently with the slender reins which bear eloquent testimony to the way in which the Kazaks regard their horses. They have a proverb: "A good horse needs not the whip."

The way led them across browning meadows and among trees where it seemed at times that no path existed. Boko Batur, looking back once to see how Osman was faring, grinned and said:

"Thinkest thou canst find the way back?"

"Nay, sir. But my horse could."

"Good!" said Boko Batur briefly. But a few moments later he turned again and added:

"Trust the horse on a road he knows. But a day comes when a new road must be found or an old road shown to a new horse. He who follows in my footsteps must learn how to find it and teach others, as well as his horse, how to find it."

Osman did learn. When he grew to manhood and the mantle of Boko Batur had fallen on his shoulders, it was his boast that after a battle he could slip away into one of his secret hiding places and all the Chinese troops in the three provinces of Sinkiang, Chinghai and Kansu could not find him though sometimes they came within earshot, and also gunshot, of him. But times changed by degrees and before the end his enemies started to hunt him with aeroplanes from which it was less easy to hide, though sometimes even the planes failed to spot him. But aeroplanes were rare till the second World War.

As Osman rode on, sometimes by Boko Batur's side now,' but more often in his wake, his keen eyes noticed the almost imperceptible signs which showed they were approaching an encampment: pieces of rock worn smooth by the passage of many animals, small strands of wool caught on a bush, sheep's droppings.

"Hast been here before?" Boko Batur asked.

"Never."

"Thy father has."

And Osman understood for the first time why his father had left the encampment sometimes in the early morning and not returned till the following day, or even the day after that. It was a lesson to him to keep his own counsel lest a friend or relation should inadvertently betray a secret. Secretiveness is a typical Kazak trait, made necessary by the conditions in which they lived. But it also made it hard for others to co-operate with them and even for them to co-operate with one another. In Osman's case, the difficulty was enhanced because he preferred to remain silent rather than tell a lie, which was by no means true of all his compatriots.

During the eighteen months which followed, Boko Batur took Osman on many forays and taught him many things a guerilla leader should know: how to shoot first hares, and then men, firing from the hip at full gallop; how to sit loose-legged and relaxed on horseback for twenty hours at a stretch and be off again on the same horse for another twenty hours after only four hours rest. In later years, Osman thought nothing of riding 300 miles at the head of his bodyguard within the space of one week.

Besides instilling courage and endurance into him, Boko Batur taught him how to lead a successful foray, by curbing his followers' excitement and letting the main body of the enemy go past unsuspecting then dashing out to cut off the rearguard and racing back into the shelter of the friendly Altai before the main body could turn. In the hills themselves, wherever the passes were narrow enough, Boko Batur used to block the road in front of a column or a caravan and then roll rocks on it from above till it turned and fled, only to find that the road had been blocked behind it after it had passed.

"It is a good life, Osman, my son," Boko Batur told him often. "O my life!" he used to add with a great belly laugh which nearly rolled him out of his saddle. "To steal up unawares behind the enemy and steal the ammunition he meant to pump into your vitals; then gallop off and be out of sight before he has had time to load his rifle. Thou wilt enjoy it, Osman."

Boko Batur's own zest for the thrilling excitements of guerilla life stands out like a beacon from the legends and stories which have sprung up round his memory. When he took Osman to be his pupil he had been ranging far and wide across Chinese Turkistan and beyond for many years seizing every opportunity he could to twist Manchu pig-tails and pull their legs, too. He is reputed to have been immensely strong and, though the Chinese captured him several times, they never succeeded in holding him for long. Sometimes they fettered him and put iron handcuffs round his wrists, but he snapped the iron, and his fingers, and was away before his captors or gaolers could pick up their rifles. It is said that once they tied him up, manacled and fettered as usual, in the skin of a freshly-killed bull and it took them some time to find an animal that was big enough. Boko Batur lay trussed in these unsavoury surroundings for a considerable time: one account says for six months. But one morning when his gaolers went to feed him, only the skin was there.

We can picture Boko Batur telling Osman about such escapades as they sat together in the firelight of the aool before they went to sleep. Osman listened enthralled. But instead of teaching Osman to emulate them, Boko Batur's puckish and foolhardy feats showed him that the struggle for independence called for caution as well as courage. He learned the paramount importance of not letting his tongue run him into unnecessary danger and the sad necessity of being always on the watch for traitors. The fact that Boko Batur's incarceration in the bull's skin was due to his having been betrayed by a Turki renegade named Ismail counted more in Osman's eyes than the strength which enabled him to regain his freedom in the end. Strength, in Osman's eyes, is the gift of God and so is wisdom, and it is the duty of him who possesses them to make sure that he uses them both well. And God protects those who do so.

Besides learning Boko Batur's way of making war, Osman also learnt how to cross the Chinese frontier into what in those days was still Tsarist Russia—or "Rassi" as Boko Batur called it—without being challenged by the Chinese frontier guards. Once across, they could journey without fear, for Boko Batur had many friends among the Russian officials. Sometimes they went north into the reindeer districts of southern Siberia. On at least one occasion they went as far as Alma Ata, the lovely capital of what is now the Soviet Republic of Kazakstan, where the orchards and climate are renowned throughout Asia. When they went back to the Altai, they took with them a long string of newly-acquired camels laden with weapons and ammunition which the Russians gave them. Then, as also later when the Reds took over from the Whites, it was Russian policy to make as much trouble as they could for the Chinese in Sinkiang because they coveted the province —and still do. There is a strip two hundred miles wide along this frontier to which Moscow has never abandoned the claim originally made by the Tsars. The Soviet Government occupied part of this strip in 1946-7 and still holds it. The Soviet claim to the other parts has not been officially withdrawn, though at the moment it is in abeyance. There is gold in this region, and wolfram, and, if the Kazak refugees in Turkey are right, uranium. Some of them add that the Russians want to erect an atomic plant there, and others that they have already done so.

With the aid of the weapons the Russians gave him, Boko Batur suddenly launched a full-scale insurrection against the Chinese. He first called a "Hur Altai," which has been the Kazak name for a Council of War since the days of Genghis Khan. To it he summoned all the captains of thousands and of tens of thousand of the Kirei Kazaks in the Altai, Tien Shan and Barkul. Many of those summoned did not come, either from jealousy or apathy or because the hand of the Chinese tax gatherer had not yet fallen heavily on them and they had still no fear that they would be assimilated into the One-Family-Under-Heaven. Nevertheless, Boko Batur was able to muster a force of nearly ten thousand.

The campaign which followed was a disaster. There was a battle near Kukuluk on the southern slopes of the Tien Shan Mountains, the precursor of another similar encounter about which we shall hear in its proper place. Then at Karashahr, before setting forth on the perilous crossing of the Thirsty Mountains, Boko Batur called his fourteen-year-old disciple to him and said:

"Turn back now, I pray thee, and leave me, for thou art needed among thy people."

And Osman, almost like Elisha, said:

"As God liveth, and while my soul is in my body upon earth, I will never leave thee."

And Boko Batur, loving him, replied:

"Nay, but thy people need thee, for, as I have prophesied: After thee shall none be born like thee and if thou wert to die, thy people would be like sheep lacking a shepherd."

"Then return with me, O my father," Osman pleaded. "For I will never leave thee."

"Nay, my son. My work is finished. I go now to spy out the land so that if at any time a trap begins to close on thee at home, there shall be a place of refuge for thee. I brought thee thus far but to show thee the way."

After the leader and his disciple had parted Boko Batur retreated across the dreaded Thirsty Mountains, to Gezkul, the lake which is straight and narrow like a ruler. His last battle was fought on the shores of another lake nearby, the name of which is Achik-kul. His irregulars were no match for the Chinese regulars when it came to a pitched battle and the end of the fray saw the Kazaks scattered beyond hope of recovery. Among the dead were Boko Batur's first wife and his youngest brother, Shuko Batur, who were buried close to the scene of the battle. Their friends and Boko Batur set memorial stones over their graves which were still there in 1950. If they have not been removed since, any nomad Kazaks who are still in this neighbourhood would no doubt show a visitor from the West these monuments, for the memory of Boko Batur and his family is still held in very great honour. But it is probable that the graves have been obliterated by the Communists with the object of obliterating the memory of those who were laid to rest in them.

After the battle, Boko Batur gathered together five thousand of his people with their flocks and herds and families and led them into the wilderness to seek new homes beyond the reach of the Chinese Central Government. They set forth, not all together as the Children of Israel did, but in small groups organised, however, just as the Children of Israel were after Jethro, the priest of Midian, had told Moses, his son-in-law, how to organise his followers, namely in thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens.

So Osman returned to his father's tent in the Valley of the Nine-Toothed Comb and Boko Batur journeyed on with his followers towards the south, across the wilderness of the vast Takla Makan desert as well as the forbidding Thirsty Mountains whose name speaks for itself. Many fell. But the majority, and Boko Batur among them, struggled through over the desert, to Achik-kul first and then, after the battle, over the mighty Kunlun Mountains to Tibet. They thus blazed a trail which Kazaks have followed at least three times since, in spite of the sufferings they endured on each occasion.

It was Boko Batur's intention to go to Turkey, but when he reached Lhasa, the claws of the Chinese dragon reached out and caught him. His head was severed from his body and exposed many days later on a long pole at one of the gates of Urumchi, the capital of Sinkiang, more than a thousand miles from where it had been cut off. It remained there while kites tore away the last vestiges of its flesh and the sun and wind shrivelled it and there was nothing left but a skull. Then the authorities threw it away and placed another skull in its stead.

And of the people who were with Boko Batur, some remained in Tibet and took wives among the people of the country and reared families which are still living there. A few crossed the Himalayas into India, but the majority trickled back to their own homes.

CHAPTER III

Osman Batur Grows Up

Though he was only fourteen years old, Osman Batur went back to his father's tents in the Valley of the Nine-Toothed Comb, not merely as a seasoned guerilla, but as the prospective successor to the most renowned guerilla leader of the time. During the eighteen months of Boko Batur's tutelage, he had learnt the tingling thrill of galloping madly into battle, rifle at his hip, using his hands to fire and reload while he controlled his horse with his body and legs— even, somehow, when he turned round in his saddle to fire at his pursuers as he galloped away after the quick raid was over and the signal had been given to scatter and withdraw. More than once, he had been put in charge of a ten, and even of a fifty. But more often he had simply kept as close as he could to Boko Batur's coal black stallion so that he could learn how Boko Batur led his men and controlled them during the battle. Strategically, Boko Batur's favourite policy was to harry; to strike a swift blow and get away into the mountains so as to strike another in some far distant spot where the Chinese were least expecting him. On such occasions his fighting men were unaccompanied by their families and flocks. And being without baggage except for the ammunition they could carry on led horses, they could, when pressed, travel a hundred miles in a day if necessary whereas the Chinese thought they were doing well when they covered thirty. But in the end, probably at Russian instigation, Boko Batur had tried to mount an offensive for which he had neither the weapons, the transport nor the right men. In their native mountains, the Kazak horsemen were a formidable foe: mobile, daring, agile, and able to use their knowledge of the ground to the best advantage. But it was they who were at a disadvantage in a pitched battle and they were quite unable to undertake a siege of a walled town; and there are many such in East Turkistan.

That was why, in 1913, it was not long before Boko Batur found himself faced with the grim alternatives of surrender, which inevitably meant death, or flight. For his men the choice lay between slipping away into hiding until the Chinese forgot about them or following their leader wheresoever he might go. That has always been the Kazak way. And it was a free choice, made individually by each fighting man who knew that if he chose the second alternative it would mean plucking up his tents and his roots and going with his whole family, his wives, his children, his flocks and his herds on a journey of not less than a thousand miles during which they would be in peril the whole way, sometimes from the Chinese and Tibetans, but much more often from the desert wastes and mountains through which their path lay.

Boko Batur was unlucky to have reached Lhasa at one of the comparatively rare periods in Tibetan history when Chinese influence was strong. I think he must have sensed that there was danger when he ordered Osman to return to the Altai. Otherwise he would surely have taken the boy right to the promised land instead of sending him home.

Osman started on his homeward journey from near Kara-shahr, a walled city by a lake on the southern fringes of the Tien Shan Mountains. Karashahr is about three hundred miles from where Osman lived, and we are told that the journey on horseback took him a week. On his way he passed the famous city of Turfan which lies in a depression nine hundred and sixty feet below sea level. It is so hot in Turfan that men and women can only cultivate their fields at night. But Turfan's grapes are nearly two inches long and have the reputation of being the sweetest and juiciest in all Asia. So have its melons.

The track, such as it was, lay partly through cultivated land and partly through open steppes and deserts. In places, the going was over stony ground where the track was hard to pick out though it was marked at intervals by skeletons of camels, horses and other animals which had fallen down and died— to the delight of kites and jackals which were constantly on the watch for such happenings. Sometimes there was a heap of stones by the side of the path, betokening that a human traveller had also fallen by the wayside and been buried. Any lone voyager, even an experienced one, had to have his wits about him when journeying along such a road and, for the fourteen-year-old Osman it was doubly necessary. He already had a reputation and if some inquisitive Chinese official or soldier had seen him and asked him to explain what he, a very young Kazak, was doing all alone so far from home, he might have found it difficult to answer. So it must have been with some trepidation that he visited a walled town and the markets in order to buy food for himself and his horse. No doubt, his anxiety diminished as he went on day after day without getting into trouble.

No fatted calf was killed for him when he reached his father's tents because that is not the Kazak way. Nor did his father congratulate him on his skill in finding the road and avoiding his enemies—indeed, Islam Bai would have thought him a fool if he had not been able to do so. Besides, Islam Bai had to be careful not to arouse speculation about his son's absence lest a traitor, or even a mere idle gossiper, should give the secret away to the Chinese.

So Osman took his place again in his father's tents as though nothing out of the usual had been happening to him during the preceding twenty months. Every now and again after he got back, strangers rode up to the encampment whom he recognised but without saying so. His father entertained them with traditional Kazak hospitality and they rode away again the next morning having said nothing during their visit which might give the impression that they and Osman had ever met before, yet leaving with him the knowledge that when the day came they would rally to his side and resume the fight against the Chinese. Osman stored up their names and usual whereabouts in his memory where it was safe from prying eyes, and did not write them down on paper. He distrusted paper.

It was from one such traveller that Osman first heard that his beloved teacher had been beheaded. It is told of him, though on what authority I cannot say, that when he heard the news, he swore an oath to revenge Boko Batur's death a thousand-fold. Certainly he made it his policy in later years to root the Chinese out utterly from the land of East Turkistan and to show no mercy to them regardless of sex or age and making no covenant with them: treating them in fact as Moses instructed the Children of Israel to treat the inhabitants when they invaded the land of Canaan. Whether Osman adopted the policy first, or the Chinese, is doubtful. But it was one which both sides found it hard to abandon even after 1944 when East Turkistan, like China itself for that matter, was making its hopeless bid for independence against the combined forces of the Chinese and Russian Communists.

For the first few years after his return, Osman lived the ordinary life of a young Kazak lad, helping his father, joining in the games and contests with other lads of his age, rounding up the semi-wild horses in the hills and branding them with the mark which had been issued by, and was registered with, the local Chinese government officials. He also learnt how to train the hunting eagles his family kept to catch the Altai foxes they needed for the skins with which they lined their clothes. He used to shear his father's sheep, too, not as we do in this country once a year when the wool is at its best, but when the price was high in the local bazaars or when the family needed felt. On such occasions, Osman used to get one of the servants to catch and hold a sheep which had not been clipped for a long while and then cut its fleece off as best he could with the primitive shears which were rather like the simple spring clippers gardeners sometimes use on small patches of grass. It was a slow business and not exactly economic from our point of view for it seldom took Osman less than an hour to "shear" a single animal. But time and money are not synonymous in the Kazak way of life, as the proverb says they are in ours.

When Osman was about sixteen—as with his birth there is no record of it—his father told him it was time to think of marriage.

"I, myself," Islam Bai said, "and, as is meet, thy mother also, have given much thought to the matter. It is right that thou, our firstborn, shouldst wed when thou art of an age to raise up seed so that our line dies not out."

"Is there a suitable maiden?" Osman asked.

"Not in our encampment as thou thyself well knowest," Islam Bai answered. "But there is one who is of good report, the daughter of Bai Mullah who is of our tribe but not of our clan. She is also one of many daughters so that her father will not demand a big marriage payment for her."

"Is not Kaini within the prohibited degrees?" Osman asked. "For it would be a sin to marry such a one. Is it not written that he who marries one of common ancestry with himself commits adultery?"

"In our tribe, as thou knowest, if there be no common ancestor within four generations, it is lawful," Islam Bai replied. "And what says the proverb: 'He who cannot name his ancestors to the seventh generation is an apostate.' Up to eight generations Bai Mullah and I have no common ancestor, not one."

"Then let an honest man be