Despite his ingenuity, organising skills and industry, mankind leaves it to a deity to turn the wilderness into the Promised Land. Unwilling to wait for a promise to be fulfilled, Grand Duke Nicholas Konstantinovich Romanov, upon his being exiled to Uzbekistan, got down to the job.The outcome was that the Romanov aristocrat, cheated of what he presumed his right to be the Tsar of Imperial Russia, created a prosperous, well-irrigated and contented...