About noon
At breakfast gather all the passengers whom the sea has not affected : the young Chinaman , Major Noltitz , Ephrinell , Miss Bluett , Monsieur Caterna , the Baron Weissschnitzerdörfer , and seven or eight other passengers . I am careful not to let the American into the secret of the case . He would be guilty of some indiscretion , and then good-by to my news par ! About noon the land is reported to the eastward , a low , yellowish land , with no rocky margin , but a few sandhills in the neighborhood of Krasnovodsk . In an hour we are in sight of Uzun Ada , and twenty-seven minutes afterward we set foot in Asia . Travelers used to land at Mikhailov , a little port at the end of the Transcaspian line ; but ships of moderate tonnage hardly had water enough there to come alongside . On this account , General Annenkof , the creator of the new railway , the eminent engineer whose name will frequently recur in my narrative , was led to found Uzun Ada , and thereby considerably shorten the crossing of the Caspian .