The Askabad Government House is a straggling one-storeyed edifice resembling an overgrown Indian bungalow, but it is well adapted for ceremonial. The other public buildings are a library with 12,000 volumes, a military printing-office, and that of the _Turkestan Gazette_--a daily paper edited by a member of the governor’s staff, which, unlike its Indian contemporary, is no dry catalogue of promotions, transfers, and official acts.
The railway between Askabad and Merv follows the now familiar Kopet Dāgh range for 105 miles, and then, at a roadside station named Dushak, trends sharply to the north-east. Here the great mountain barrier between Transcaspia and the dominions of the Shāh attains the height of 9000 feet; and its spurs, clad with rich verdure, offer an ever-changing succession of graceful outlines. The intervening plain is covered with thorny camel-grass, varied by patches of cultivation, where mountain torrents afford the means of irrigation. A wider expanse of green betrays the vicinity of the river Tajand, better known to fame as the Harī Rūd, which laves the walls of Herāt. It is crossed by a girder bridge 347 feet in length. Merv is reached in thirteen hours from Askabad. Nowhere in Central Asia is the contrast more marked between the present and a comparatively recent past. It is difficult to believe that this pale copy of an Indian junction can have been the robbers’ den so elaborately described by Marvin from hearsay, and by O’Donovan from bitter personal experience. A broad metalled road, parallel with the line of railway, leads to the Murghāb, a canal-like stream crossed by a bridge with ninety-six feet water-way. On the right bank of this ancient source of Merv’s prosperity are the remains of a stupendous line of ramparts, which, O’Donovan tells us,[680] were commenced in hot haste by the Tekkes in the vain hope that they might serve as a bulwark against the Russian advance. From their crest, thirty feet above the plain, the barracks of the garrison are seen embowered in stately trees. Merv has immense strategic value, and is therefore the headquarters of a force far larger than would be necessary to overawe the scanty population of the oasis. There are four battalions of Transcaspian Rifles, one of sappers, a railway battalion, and two batteries of field artillery. On the east of the Murghāb, too, is the Russian town, laid out with the same depressing regularity as Askabad. But the bungalows which line the dusty streets are redeemed by no wealth of tropical foliage. The humanising effects of gardening are not appreciated by Russians, and the jealously watered compounds of the officials enclose only scraggy trees and stuccoed buildings. The interiors are less forbidding. The rooms have polished floors, but little in the way of furniture save low divans spread with Turkoman carpets and tiger skins.[681]