A FIGHT WITH AN AFGHAN

Hokitika Guardian, 27 January 1930, Page 2

A FIGHT WITH AN AFGHAN

TRIP ACROSS CASPIAN SEA. By LINDSAY HOREN. BAKU, Azerbaijan), U.S.S.R. The trip across the Caspian Sea was terrible. We had to travel steerage.— 100 near-Eastern Orientals and Russians crowded into a hold with us—tlie entire room not more than twentyfive feet wide by thirty feet long, with wooden shelves which one could hardly find in the darkness.

And we had a storm, I do not believe there were five persons beside ourselves who wre not sick. Such collective sea-sickness I have never seen before, and all in the hold of a- listing, plunging steamer, hardly bigger than a tug on the Great Lakes. ’Things started with a row, too. When we got on in Kra-sovodsk and found our shelves, they were occup.ed by an Afgan and his family, which consisted of a wife, four children, a baby, luggage, and two pails of fish. The Afghan spoke less- Russian than 1 did, but that wasn’t the trouble. He simply refused to move.

So after twenty minutes of arguing I threw his fish off the shelf and put my suitcase on it. The children and the baby began to yell and the wife, a beautiful, scared creature, began jabbering at me in Afghan, and the head of the family tried to throw by suitcase off. We were just getting well into the first round, I was afraid that my adversary was going to produce a knife, when all his clansmen and the ship’s crew arrived to quell the riot. We won, though. Afghan, wife, four children, baby, luggage, and fish were all kicked out. But 1 did not relnx and feel secure from, the Afghan’s possible vengeance- until the ship began to rock, and he and his entire family immediately succumbed to such terrible sea-sickness that even I felt sorry for them. Among the bits of humour on the unforgettable steamr Fomine was the drunkenness of the cook, who, with tiie rolling ship, could not hit the meat he was trying to cut up with a cleaver at one side of the boiler room. As one approaches Baku from the Caspian-he is greeted with one of the strangest sights in the world—oil wells on the Apherson Peninsula, clustering so thick that the look like a black forest.

This entire area is sixty feet below sea-level. In some places the wells are being sunk in the water. Baku is one of the greatest oil producing centres of the world. The city is highly interesting as an ancient Persian stronghold. Baku has existed since the fifth century. For many centuries it served as a residence for the Persian khans. It has been fought over and captured by Turks, .Russians and Armenians. Although most of Baku is a modern European city, the old section, where the Tartars and Persians live, is a dreamy hodge-podge of crooked lanes, mosques, minarets and fortresses, with ttat-roofed houses, dark, little shops and sleepy natives pulling at bubbling hookahs. Standing above all else is the Kiz Kalian Maiden’s Tower), a round fortress built in. the twelfth century and considered impregnable. We explored its mysterious passageways and staircases. The country around Baku is arid, appearing much like the hills on the east side of the Caspian. We shall hurry on to the fertile valleys of Georgia in the Caucasus.