The river has the characteristic appearance of a mountain stream that brings down a mass of gravel and spreads in wide floods over the flat lands, changing its bed and branches every year. The rivers of Turkestan are of the same type, and so is the Po in Italy. In general, all sorts of plums grow very well in Russian Turkestan, but their cultivation has decayed and been abandoned, as the fruit is attacked by a small moth, Cydia funebrana. The plum itself is not very good and does not yield a particularly good fruit in European gardens, but in our soil, under the sun of Turkestan, it gave a first-rate, great, luscious plum with a slight fragrance of pineapple. In Bukhara Abdu Ghani Hodja had advised the Emir, in view of the numerous so-called "fronts" in the Autonomous Republic of Turkestan, to send his valuables and treasure through Afghanistan to European banks and supply himself with arms and ammunition.