'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎70] (101/714)

PERSIA
CHAPTER IV
transcaspia
I hear the tread of pioneers
Of nations yet to be,
The first low wash of waves where soon
Shall roll a human sea.
The rudiments of Empire here
Are plastic yet and warm,
The chaos of a mighty world
Is rounding into form.
J. G. W hittiek, On an Eagle's Quill.
Before proceeding with the record ot my travels, I propose in a
short chapter to give the latest information concerning the Trans-
I in Caspian Railway and Transcaspia, so as to bring the
formation narrative of its progress as nearly as possible up to the
present time. Such readers as wish to tread immediately upon
Persian soil will omit this chapter. In my former work, ' Russia
in Central Asia,' I carried the history of the railroad as far as the
autumn of 1889. I^ater writers have discoursed upon the subject,
but have added little to our store of knowledge. 1 I think I may
claim to be almost the only Englishman who has on two separate
occasions journeyed over the line ; and the information supplied in
this chapter must therefore be regarded as complementary to that
contained in the afore-mentioned volume. Nor can the subject be
considered as alien to a work professedly dealing with Persia and
the Persian Question, seeing that for nearly oOO miles of its length
General Annenkoff's railway runs parallel and in close proximity
to the Persian frontier, that its existence has already had a con
siderable, and is likely to have an even greater, influence upon the
politics and trade of the important Persian province of Khorasan,
and that the only side from which the railway, viewed strategically,
is open to danger is by attack from the Persian border mountains
1 I must except two interesting papers by Captain A. C. Yate, on the Tashkent
Exhibition, 1890, in the Proceedings of the ll.G.S., January 1891, and 'A Journey
to Tashkent' in the Journal of the Scotch Geographical Society.
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