At Tomsk the Emir was to receive his victorious troops. A festival, with songs and dances, followed by some noisy orgies, was to be given in their honor.
The place chosen with Asiatic taste for this ceremony was a wide plateau situated on a part of the hill overlooking, at some hundred feet distance, the course of the Tom. The long perspective of elegant mansions and churches with their green cupolas, the windings of the river, the whole scene bathed in warm mists, appeared as it were in a frame formed by groups of pines and gigantic cedars.
To the left of the plateau, a brilliant scene representing a palace of strange architecture—no doubt some specimen of the Bukharan monuments, half Moorish, half Tartar—had been temporarily erected on wide terraces. Above the palace and the minarets with which it bristled, among the high branches of the trees which shaded the plateau, tame storks, brought from Bukhara with the Tartar army, flew about in thousands.
The terraces had been reserved for the Emir’s court, the Khans his allies, the great dignitaries of the Khanates, and the harems of each of these Turkenstan sovereigns.
Of these sultanas, who are for the most part merely slaves bought in the markets of Transcaucasia and Persia, some had their faces uncovered, and others wore a veil which concealed their features. All were dressed with great magnificence. Handsome pelisses with short sleeves allowed the bare arms to be seen, loaded with bracelets connected by chains of precious stones, and the little hands, the fingernails being tinted with the juice of the henna. Some of these pelisses were made of silk, fine as a spider’s web; others of a flexible aladja, which is a narrow-striped texture of cotton; and at the least movement they made that rustle so agreeable in the ears of an Oriental. Under this first garment were brocaded petticoats, covering the silken trousers, which were fastened a little above neat boots, well shaped and embroidered with pearls. Some of the women whose features were not concealed by veils might have been admired for their long plaited hair, escaping from beneath their various colored turbans, their splendid eyes, their magnificent teeth, their dazzling complexions, heightened by the blackness of the eyebrows, connected by a slight line, and the eyelashes touched with a little black-lead.
At the foot of the terraces, gay with standards and pennons, watched the Emir’s own guards, armed with curved sabres, daggers in their belts, and lances six feet long in their hands. A few of these Tartars carried white sticks, others enormous halberds ornamented with tufts of gold and silver thread.
All around over this vast plateau, as far as the steep slopes, the bases of which were washed by the Tom, was massed a crowd composed of all the native elements of Central Asia. Uzbeks were there, with their tall caps of black sheepskin, their red beards, their gray eyes, and their arkalouk, a sort of tunic cut in the Tartar fashion. There thronged Turkomans, dressed in the national costume—wide trousers of a bright color, with vest and mantle woven of camel’s-hair; red caps, conical or wide; high boots of Russian leather; and sabre knife hung at the waist by a thong. There, near their masters, appeared the Turkoman women, their hair lengthened by cords of goats’-hair; the chemisette open under the djouba, striped with blue, purple, and green; the logs laced with colored bands, crossing each other to the leathern clog. There, too—as if all the Russian-Chinese frontier had risen at the Emir’s voice—might be seen Manchus, faces shaven, matted hair, long robes, sash confining the silken skirt at the waist, and oval caps of crimson satin, with black border and red fringe; and with them splendid specimens of the women of Manchuria, wearing coquettish headdresses of artificial flowers, kept in their places by gold pins and butterflies lightly laid on their black hair. Lastly, Mongols, Bukharans, Persians, and Turkenstan-Chinese completed the crowd invited to the Tartar festival.
Siberians along were wanting in this reception of the invaders. Those who had not been able to fly were confined to their houses, in dread of the pillage which Feofar-Khan would perhaps order to worthily terminate this triumphal ceremony.
At four o’clock the Emir made his entry into the square, greeted by a flourish of trumpets, the rolling sound of the big drums, salvos of artillery and musketry.
Feofar mounted his favorite horse, which carried on its head an aigrette of diamonds. The Emir still wore his uniform.
He was accompanied by a numerous staff, and beside him walked the Khans of Kokand and Kunduz and the grand dignitaries of the Khanates.
At the same moment appeared on the terrace the chief of Feofar’s wives, the queen, if this title may be given to the sultana of the states of Bukhara. But, queen or slave, this woman of Persian origin was wonderfully beautiful. Contrary to the Muhammadan custom, and no doubt by some caprice of the Emir, she had her face uncovered. Her hair, divided into four plaits, fell over her dazzling white shoulders, scarcely concealed by a veil of silk worked in gold, which fell from the back of a cap studded with gems of the highest value. Under her blue-silk petticoat, striped with a darker shade, fell the zirdjameh of silken gauze, and above the sash lay the pirahn of the same texture, sloping gracefully to the neck. But from the head to the little feet, encased in Persian slippers, such was the profusion of jewels—gold beads strung on silver threads, chaplets of turquoises, firouzehs from the celebrated mines of Alborz, necklaces of carnelians, agates, emeralds, opals, and sapphires—that her dress seemed to be literally made of precious stones. The thousands of diamonds which sparkled
