Page:England & Russia in Central Asia,Vol-I.djvu/61

Rh broken across by great mounds of sand, which, Vambery tells us, are of considerable altitude and great breadth.

There is, among other arms of the Oxus, the Loudon canal, which has recently been refilled, and of which something must here be said for the elucidation of the question under treatment. The Loudon canal used to flow from the vicinity of the fortified place of Bend into the lake of Aibughir. By means of that canal, which carried off a considerable portion of the waters of the Oxus, Aibughir was a lake, forming the south-west corner of the Aral sea. In that quarter of the Khivan state a section of the Yomult Turcomans resided and still reside; but between them and the Khan feuds were of frequent occurrence. In this quarter of Asia it has been, since the days of the sons of Genghis Khan, a common practice in warfare to supplement military strength and skill by manual labour; and whenever an enemy appeared too strong to be resisted in the field, the rivers and canals of the country have been dammed up, either to cause a flood to retard his advance, or for the purpose of removing the fertilising means which nature had placed at the disposal of the antagonistic people or tribe. It was with this latter object in view that the Khan of Khiva, in 1857, erected a dam across the upper end of the Loudon canal, near the fort of Bend, for in that year the Yomult chief, Atta Mourad Khan, declared war upon the Khan, and the Khan retaliated in the manner described. Now, whether because that dam was imperfectly constructed, or that the force of the