Word: bokharas
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This book is a reverent and amusing hymn to a handful of adventurers who penetrated the bone-littered wastes of Central Asia during the past 125 years. Many of them stayed there, with their heads cleaved from their bodies by the bloodthirsty rulers of Bokhara, Merv, Kokand and Khiva. The most fascinating of these adventurers was one Joseph Wolff, a disputatious Jew turned Anglican missionary, who set out in 1843 to rescue two British officers held captive in Bokhara...
...Bokhara to liberate the British officers, Missionary Wolff stopped off in Teheran to shout down the Shah of Persia, paused at Merv for a three-cornered theological debate with a dervish and a Talmudic scholar. Arriving in Bokhara with its Tower of Death, verminous dungeons and treacherous Emir, Wolff grandly ordered that the British prisoners be handed over to him. "How extraordinary," exclaimed the Emir. "I have 200,000 Persian slaves here-nobody cares for them; and on account of two Englishmen, a person comes from England and single-handedly demands their release." Wolff was jolted to discover that...
Journalist Koestler made his pilgrimage to Russia just in time for the great 1932 famine, and traveled all the way to fabled Bokhara, where the muezzin had been replaced by the morning loudspeaker ("Get up, get up, empty your bowels, do your exercises . . ."). When he fell in love with a breathtakingly beautiful employee of the Baku Water Supply Board (whom he later denounced to the police as a suspected spy), Koestler found in her pathetic ignorance of the outside world his first seeds of disgust with Soviet Russia. But he still had a long way to travel before...
Like the NKVD, His Majesty's Foreign Office took little interest in their secretary's love of ancient Samarkand and Bokhara. What delighted them was up-to-date, first-hand information about the Soviet interior that young Maclean shipped home in his reports. Before long they summoned him back to London, rejoicing at having added to the home staff so valuable an expert on Soviet affairs...
...came to power, the films were sent via the French Line. From 1935 to 1938, Chambers had two sources in the State Department (so far only Hiss has been named publicly). At one point, four "high sources" in Washington were so productive, Chambers said, that Moscow sent them rich Bokhara rugs in appreciation...