ABSTRACT
Marco Polo is the best known European to have ventured there, and he did so as early as the thirteenth century; but innumerable travellers have toiled over its mountains and its plains, covering immense distances and spending years of their lives on the journeys. The arba is a cart with two wheels of incredible height supporting a wooden platform with rigid shafts all in one piece. A faster one is the usual springless Russian tarantass, the conveyance used on all the high-roads of Russia. A donkey is a different thing, and that is the animal which most natives ride: patient and enduring, it trots about all day long. Central Asia is a dry country and most of its rivers never flow into anything, being used up for irrigation and ending in fan-shaped networks of canals; nevertheless there are some peculiar modes of travel by water. On the Amoo-Daria the caiooks are of a much larger type.
