Installed on a specially designed wagon aboard a shallow draught boat, often the only possible mode of transport, Procoudine-Gorsky took thousands of clichés verre between 1909 and 1916, illustrating his travels in the Urals, Volga, Murmansk, Siberia, Dagestan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan and his stays in the legendary cities of Bukhara and Samarkand. Nearly 2,000 of these glass plates, which left Russia in 1918, were acquired by the Library of Congress in Washington, DC in 1948. The images preserved in trunks on this fragile medium were forgotten for nearly a century.