political rights equal to those of their Turkoman compatriots?

There are a few Tadjiks of Persian origin, the handsomest men you can
imagine. They have booked for Merv, or Bokhara, or Samarkand, or
Tachkend, or Kokhand, and will not pass the Russo-Chinese frontier. As
a rule they are second-class passengers. Among the first-class
passengers I noticed a few Usbegs of the ordinary type, with retreating
foreheads and prominent cheek bones, and brown complexions, who were
the lords of the country, and from whose families come the emirs and
khans of Central Asia.

But are there not any Europeans in this Grand Transasiatic train? It
must be confessed that I can only count five or six. There are a few
commercial travelers from South Russia, and one of those inevitable
gentlemen from the United Kingdom, who are inevitably to be found on
the railways and steamboats. It is still necessary to obtain permission
to travel on the Transcaspian, permission which the Russian
administration does not willingly accord to an Englishman; but this man
has apparently been able to get one.

And he seems to me to be worth notice. He is tall and thin, and looks
quite the fifty years that his gray hairs proclaim him to be. His
characteristic expression is one of haughtiness, or rather disdain,
composed in equal parts of love of all things English and contempt for
all things that are not. This type is occasionally so insupportable,
even to his compatriots, that Dickens, Thackeray and others have often
made fun of it. How he turned up his nose at the station at Uzun Ada,
at the train, at the men, at the car in which he had secured a seat by
placing in it his traveling bag! Let us call him No. 8 in my pocketbook.