The Amū Daryā bridge is 4600 yards in length, including the approaches. The water-way is 2270 yards, and a permanent way is laid 35 feet above the mean river-level. The small cost of the structure is not its least recommendation. Official statistics place it at £44,000, without, however, reckoning the cost of transport and the pay of the railway battalion engaged in erecting it. The whole is of wood; and it is impossible to look down on the rapid current swirling round the piles without a feeling of wonder that so frail a structure should have borne the strain of eleven years. But fire is a far more dangerous foe than water. The rainfall at Charjūy is insignificant, and the mass of bristling piles as dry as touchwood. It is crossed daily by trains drawn by locomotives burning petroleum fuel, and boats loaded with inflammables constantly pass beneath. There are six fire-stations, and the bridge is patrolled night and day; but all protective measures would be useless if the flames once took hold. It is this consideration which has induced the authorities to face the immense expense involved in a steel girder bridge.
A pause of three months followed the conquest of this great barrier; and, in September 1887, the engineers attacked the last portion of their task--the 216 miles between the Amū Daryā and Samarkand. They were aided by a third railway battalion 1000 strong, incorporated in 1886, and posted at Charjūy in the beginning of the following year. The final section, however, was mere child’s play as compared with those already traversed. After passing through 28 miles of desert, the line enters at Kara Kūl on a cultivated zone, watered by the river Zarafshān and its affluents, which extends as far as the terminus at Samarkand. The capital of Tamerlane was reached in May 1888, and on the 1st of the succeeding month trains began running with regularity between the Caspian and Samarkand, a distance of 879 miles.[646] General Annenkoff’s achievement was rewarded with the generous appreciation meted out to every Russian servant of the state who distinguishes himself by devotion to duty. “During three years,” wrote his imperial master in a rescript dated 5th July 1888, “you have worked with the energy which distinguishes you in accomplishing the task, sparing neither health nor strength in a constant struggle with natural obstacles which seemed almost insuperable. In just recompense for the service you have rendered to the state, we have granted you the insignia in diamonds of the Order of St. Alexander Nevsky, which we command you to wear according to regulations.”[647] In thus hailing the completion of a line linking the Caspian with Samarkand the Tsar could hardly have foreseen the vast economic results of General Annenkoff’s enterprise. Its inception was due to considerations of politics and strategy,--if the Central Asian Railway would rob the desert of its terrors, strengthen Russia’s hold on the newly conquered territory, and give the means of overawing Persia and Afghanistān; and so it was treated as a military work and placed under the governor of Transcaspia, who was himself subordinate to the Minister of War. But trains had hardly begun to run ere merchants and passengers flocked to the station; goods accumulated in masses which defied the slender means of transport. In 1893, 185,000 tons of merchandise and material were carried; and in 1897 the volume dealt with aggregated 249,000.[648] Trade left its old channels and poured into that which gave merchants steamer communication with the great consuming centres and the seaboard. Tea, which cheers the nomad as well as his civilised brother, no longer enters Central Asia through Afghanistān. It is transhipped at Bombay into steamers which convey it to Batum. Thence it crosses the Caucasus by rail and the Caspian by steamer, and finds the terminus of the Central Asian Railway at Krasnovodsk. This trade is of very recent growth. In 1893 none travelled by rail; in 1897 no less than 6,192,000 pounds. The commerce with Russia has been equally affected. The wool and cotton worked up in Moscow factories no longer reaches them by camel caravan; while the manufactured beet-sugar and drugs so largely in demand in the Khānates travel by the new route. That the railway should have profoundly modified the whole course of Central Asian commerce is a natural outcome of the line selected by the Tsar’s advisers. It follows the principal channel whence the silks, sugars, and stuffs of India and China poured into Europe during the ages illumined by Greek culture, and moulded by the governing instincts of Rome. Balkh in Northern Afghanistān was a rendezvous for caravans from the south and east.