5
Kuljan
Kuljan was an orphan. Her mother, Djevger, a Turkmenian by origin, bore no resemblance to the Kazakh women inhabiting the foothills of the Urals. Slim, with large black eyes and unusually long eyebrows, and braids reaching below her knees, Djevger looked like a graceful statuette of ebony brought from India by some accident. At the age of seven she was engaged to an oldish Bukharan merchant who traveled with his caravans to the banks of the Volga and to the Urals. He often took her on these distant and difficult treks; when she was barely seventeen, he died of cholera not far away from the camp of Djantemir. Nobody knew where and how the libertine bai had cast his eye on her but, with the merchant buried, his brothers and commercial partners bartered the young widow for sheep t
