SAMARKAND

From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, We'll lead you to the stately tent of war, Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine Threatening the world with high-astounding terms, And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword. --MARLOWE*

From Samarkand the Golden, once capital of half the conquered world, and seat of Tamburlaine news came last week of things deep stirring in the heart of Asia. Bleak Soviets rule today, instead of Tamburlaine, but even so the men of Samarkand still sip iced honey as of old, still deal in that exquisite lambskin, caracul, worth sometimes -L-500 ($2430) a hide and still transship eight hundred million pounds of Chinese tea each year to Russia. The men of Samarkand were occupied last week in quite the good old way. The women were causing trouble.

Woman's Day. It was Woman's Day," a day observed throughout the Soviet Union, even in its remotest province, Samarkand. The local women have long since been told by Communist zealots to take off their pirandja (veil) and some of them have long since done so. But last week 600 emancipated women paraded Samarkand in facial nakedness.

They entered the great Registan (Market Place) of which Lord Curzon has written: "It was originally and is still, even in its ruins, the noblest public square in the World."/- The women, with faces on which an absence of reverence could be descried, stood before the three great mosques facing the Registan, mocking the commands of Mohammed by their shameless presence. Soon the venerable priesthood emerged rampant, the effect of their imprecations being enhanced by the fact that in Samarkand old men dye their beards pink with henna.

Undaunted, the feminists and their Communist leaders marched away to the house of a rich Persian merchant. His wife they suspected to be held imprisoned and frequently castigated because she had ventured to enter a bazaar veilless some months ago, had been seized by her husband's retainers, shut up in solitude. With the assistance of the Russian police, roused to investigate the Persian's house, a door was forced and the inner compound entered. At a stake set up in a pool of muddy offal was found, chained like a dog, the merchant's feminist wife. Rescued, nursed, she hovered between death and recovery.

Honorable Great Queen. Meanwhile, as the week advanced, the holy Ichans (Priests) successfully rallied the faithful to combat feminism. They remembered not the benevolent attitude toward women-kind of Tamburlaine the Great. He, magnanimous, referred to his chief wife as "The Honorable Great Lady." When she entered a state apartment 15 ladies-in-waiting held up the perimeter of her enormous skirt of silk and cloth of gold to enable her to walk. Three more attendants steadied by silken cords her towering headdress, which began with a wealth of black hair, rose like an immense extinguisher bestudded with gems, and was surmounted by a pretty little gold castle from which sprouted a crowning spray of ostrich plumes.

The Honorable Great Lady, thus bedight, partook with her additional 300 ladies-in-waiting of bosat, a beverage then esteemed and consisting, much like the modern "milk shake," of flavored sugar and cream. While she presided, swathed to immobility in riches, the courtiers of Tamburlaine--according to an ancient historian--"would fall down drunk before her; and this was considered very jovial, for . . . there can be no pleasure without drunken men."

Not very jovial was the manner in which a mob, roused by the priests last week, set out to discipline women less docile than the ancient queen. Three women who were caught veilless were bound to stakes and exposed to a pious mob which threw stones until the women died. One youthful male Communist was likewise bound, reviled by the Ichans (Priests), and beaten to death with flails, despite attempts by the police to rescue him. Kindlers of Asia. All over the province of Samarkand and throughout Turkestan similar outbursts were provoked last week by "Woman's Day." This remote region, so long slumberously out of the world, seemed to be kindling again from the sparks struck by Soviet ideals. The human fuel there is crude and lumpy; but so are the logs one needs for a great fire. It is the dream of Soviet Russians that their statesmen may become the successors to the great kindlers of Asia: Alexander, Jenghiz Khan, his grandson Kublai Khan and Tamburlaine.

"Conquerors of the World." These mighty heroes deemed that in conquering Asia they had "conquered the world," and the subsequent discovery of lands they had never heard of scarcely dims their devastating glory.

Alexander of Macedon ("The Great"), though he died many a century before George Washington, is still held in a mellow, Washingtonian esteem at Samarkand. The natives appear to have forgiven that he sacked and burned their city, remember only how he wrought great glory there, and refer to him affectionately as "Iskander Macedonski."

Very different is the attitude at Samarkand toward the two greatest Khans.* The natives seem indifferent that the conquests of these two mighty princes made them dreaded and obeyed from Poland and Peking to India. For some reason the sack of Samarkand by Jenghiz Khan is treasured up in the native mind as an atrocity altogether reprehensible and comparatively recent (1221 A. D.). Strolling about with a native guide one hears said of whatever seems to be in disrepair that "it was all right until Jenghiz Khan came"--an explanation provocative of hilarity when offered by native children to account for the delay or nonarrival of trains at Samarkand from the Trans-Caspian or Moscow-Kirghiz lines.

Tamburlaine the Great. As U. S. citizens sink their every prejudce in praising Lincoln, so Timur is always upon approving lips at Samarkand. The largest slab of jade known to exist is his tombstone (6 ft. x 17 in. x 14 in); and every child of Samarkand has stood in the great vaulted octagonal hall where the green jade tomb reposes, surrounded by six family tombs of white marble.

The stories told of Tamburlaine --told day in and day out by professional story-tellers for five centuries--are naturally by now very ornate. When one of Timur's sons was married, so the story goes, Timur seven times disrobed and robed again the bridegroom and the bride, pouring over their heads each time they stood unclad heaping baskets of Orient pearls which were then scornfully trodden underfoot and abandoned to the populace--always a much-applauded climax to the storyteller's tale.

It seems authentic, however, that Tamburlaine wrote or dictated late in life a plenitude of arresting statements, a sort of regal book of maxims and autobiography. "At twelve years of age," he declares, "I fancied I perceived in myself all the signs of greatness and wisdom, and whoever came to visit me I received with great dignity and hauteur. ... At 18 I became vain. . . ." At 21 he began, as the son of a powerful noble, the prodigious series of conquests which realized his fondest boasts within 30 years, and left him an old age of mighty pomp and impressive circumstance. "My armies were all assembled," he writes on one proud day, "and they covered 13 square miles of ground." Yet on another day he dictates with seemingly equal gusto how by the chance of war he became lost from his innumerable hosts and spent 63 days in the foul dungeon of a petty chieftain.

A rare, redoubtable hero; but the most revealing anecdote of all, tolerably authenticated, has to do with his ugliness. Lame, blind in one eye, pockmarked, his appearance was sinister. One day, chancing to examine himself in a mirror attentively for the first time, he recoiled in horror, wept, fell to bemoaning that he could not bear to look upon himself. "Nay, Lord," soothed an ingenious and daring courtier, "pluck up thy spirits! Thou art braver than us all, yet have we not schooled ourselves to look unflinchingly every day upon thy face?"

*These lines, the prologue to Christopher Marlowe's tragedy of Tamburlaine the Great, were reputedly first spoken on the Elizabethan stage in 1587, scarce two centuries after the great Asiatic conqueror Timur the Lame (Tamburlaine) had sickened and died of drinking too much iced honey when overheated. /-He amplified and explained: "No European spectacle can adequately be compared with it, in our inability to point to an open space in any Western city that is commanded on three of its four sides by Gothic cathedrals of the finest order. . . . I know . . . nothing in Europe, save perhaps, on a humble scale, the Piazza di San Marco at Venice, which can even aspire to ... the competition." (The Registan is commanded on three sides by the imposing mosques of Ulug-Beg, Shir-tiar and Tilla-kari, the facades of which, though damaged, still display the bright colors of perfectly fired and glazed tile.) * Jenghiz (1162-1227), Kublai (1216-1294).