ABSTRACT
Before proceeding with the record of my travels, I propose in a short chapter to give the latest information concerning the Trans-caspian Railway and Transcaspia, so as to bring the narrative of its progress as nearly as possible up to the present time. Such readers as wish to tread immediately upon Persian soil will omit this chapter. In my former work, ‘Russia in Central Asia,’ I carried the history of the railroad as far as the autumn of 1889. Later writers have discoursed upon the subject, but have added little to our store of knowledge. 1 I think I may claim to be almost the only Englishman who has on two separate occasions journeyed over the line; and the information supplied in this chapter must therefore be regarded as complementary to that contained in the afore-mentioned volume. Nor can the subject be considered as alien to a work professedly dealing with Persia and the Persian Question, seeing that for nearly 300 miles of its length General Annenkoff's railway runs parallel and in close proximity to the Persian frontier, that its existence has already had a considerable, and is likely to have an even greater, influence upon the politics and trade of the important Persian province of Khorasan, and that the only side from which the railway, viewed strategically, is open to danger is by attack from the Persian border mountains on the south. Some of these subjects will require additional treatment in later chapters. I will here limit myself to the engineering, political, and commercial advances which have been made since I first visited Transcaspia.
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