We often hear of the extraordinary rapidity with which the Americans
have thrown their railroads across the plains of the Far West. But the
Russians are in no whit behind them, if even they have not surpassed
them in rapidity as well as in industrial audacity.

People are fully acquainted with the adventurous campaign of General
Skobeleff against the Turkomans, a campaign of which the building of
the railway assured the definite success. Since then the political
state of Central Asia has been entirely changed, and Turkestan is
merely a province of Asiatic Russia, extending to the frontiers of the
Chinese Empire. And already Chinese Turkestan is very visibly
submitting to the Muscovite influence which the vertiginous heights of
the Pamir plateau have not been able to check in its civilizing march.

I was about to cross the countries which were formerly ravaged by
Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, those fabulous countries of which the
Russians in 1886 possessed six hundred and fifteen thousand square
kilometres, with thirteen hundred thousand inhabitants. The southern
part of this region now forms the Transcaspian province, divided into
six districts, Fort Alexandrovski, Krasnovodsk, Askhabad, Karibent,
Merv, Pendjeh, governed by Muscovite colonels or lieutenant-colonels.

As may be imagined, it hardly takes an hour to see Uzun Ada, the name
of which means Long Island. It is almost a town, but a modern town,
traced with a square, drawn with a line or a large carpet of yellow
sand. No monuments, no memories, bridges of planks, houses of wood, to
which comfort is beginning to add a few mansions in stone. One can see
what this, first station of the Transcaspian will be like in fifty
years; a great city after having been a great railway station.