II
As the sun was sinking I found a resting-place soon. I chose a pleasant grassy hollow sheltered by two boulders. It was above the road and just beneath a graveyard: I could see all that happened on the road without standing the chance of being seen myself. But in truth there was little to see, beyond an occasional horseman and an ox-cart now and then. Each man who came rested a little beside the tombs before going on, for the road was a stiff climb. At sunset a party of Mahommedans came and said their prayers, faced Mecca, bowed to the earth, kissed it, rose and bowed again.
Then the owls stepped out from their hiding-places in the walls of the rocks and flew for little stretches noiselessly, and shrieked at one another. The shadow after sunset had begun low and now was claiming the summits of the cliffs; presently it would rest upon the sky itself, and night would have come. One by one the stars appeared, and I lay in my sleeping-sack and looked up at them. It became a perfect night, lit by a bright moon and a myriad of clearest stars. There was a silent breeze and a freshness on its wings; I lay full stretched on the ground and fitted my body to the soft earth. One could almost imagine that the dead in the tombs all lay as I did and stared into the starry heaven: I looked at the railed-in village of the dead above me and down to where the large tombs lay. They did lie as the poet wished, “under the wide and starry sky,” and, to the dwellers in the villages, to be buried so was ordinary. They knew of no other life or death. They could not compare their stars with other stars, and therefore knew not of their beauty. I had seen the human stars lit on the Thames Embankment. It seemed very beautiful that the hand which wrote:
“Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie,”
also wrote, “There are no stars like the Edinburgh gaslamps and no atmosphere like the air of Auld Reekie.” Again one wished to be everywhere at home. “Philosophy,” Novalis said, “was home-sickness.”
A little procession of cloud-scuds passed over the sky and I fell asleep. I awakened again as the dawn light was flooding upward: the peaks of distant white summits were rosy-red with the reflection of sunrise. Then gradually, as the shadow had climbed upward the night before, so the light came down—down, down into the valley. It was as if angels were being let down by shining rope ladders. A lark jumped from the grass beside me, brown and wet, and twittered on a boulder and sang three notes. It was magical.
I gathered sticks and dry grass and made a fire, and watched it burn, and boiled a kettle on it, and made tea and munched millet-bread. I had a supply of this “biscuit.” After tea a river dip and then onward!
The whole of this day, from sunrise to sunset, I wandered and met not one human being. Therefore I nearly starved, for I had a very poor day’s rations in my bag. After making my detour past Fortoug I had to climb the steep cliff in order to proceed, for there was no means of following the river otherwise. The water hugged the rock and was very deep and rapid. I crept through a wood on hands and knees, and when I got to the other side found an impassable wall stretching up to the snow-line. I found a cleft, however, and a path leading away from the direction I wished to take. I went along this. It was difficult to follow, and led up to a perfectly barren region, where there was not a shrub or blade of grass, or even a piece of moss to be seen; nothing but grey rock and the waste end of last winter’s snow, not yet melted by the summer sun. I grew rather anxious, for I had no wish to sleep at such a height in such cold air, but suddenly the path diverged downward again, and late in the evening I clambered down a dangerously steep slope right into a valley. The boulders were very loose, and there was a chaos of them, large and small. One had to step from one to another all the way down, and sometimes just a touch would send a rock bigger than myself thundering into the valley below. At last, in the twilight of the evening, I found myself on the Georgian road in the Gorge of Dariel. I was some way up the gorge, just at the Trans-Caucasian frontier. I hailed a cart coming along and got a lift to the Kazbek village. It was quite dark when we arrived, so I plucked out Nicholas’s epistle from my bosom and inquired the way to the village pope.
CHAPTER XV
THE IKON NOT MADE BY HANDS
VLADIMIR ALEXANDROVITCH was, I suppose, one of the minor clergy. It was evident he was very poor; his house consisted of one room only, and was furnished by two chairs and a table. Several Ikons hung on the walls. On the floor a rough black sheepskin mat showed where he slept. He wouldn’t find me a lodging, but bade me welcome to his own. We ate kasha together, buckwheat porridge, and then he put the samovar on and we had tea. The Ikons were all Christ-faces, and they watched us all through the meal in a way that gave the place a strange atmosphere. At my elbow stood a famous picture, one that many Russians love beyond all others as a comforter. It is called “The Joy of all the Afflicted”; it is, of course, a portrait of Christ painted in the features of a Russian peasant. It means nothing to a foreigner, but somehow it appeals to the peasant; it brings Christ very near to him, it makes Him a fellow-man. Opposite me was “The Ikon not made by hands,” also a peasant face, but having an expression as cold as the other was warm. But this one was arresting; one’s eyes continually rested upon it and tried to discover some hidden meaning. I asked the priest to tell me the story of it, and it was not until the end that I discovered that it was a version of the St Veronica legend. I don’t know now whether he would agree with the version of his story I should tell. But this is how it remains in my mind.
The fame of Jesus spread into many countries, even before the time of His death. It came to Abyssinia where a queen was dying. The tidings came of the healing of the sick, the raising from the dead, tidings of all the wonderful faith-miracles wrought in the distant land where Jesus was teaching. The tidings were brought to the dying queen, and as she heard a light passed over her face. All those who stood by wondered and hoped, for in the sudden light in the eyes of the queen they deemed they saw the promise of new life. The queen was silent, and looked on them, and then the light faded away, and she said: “If I might see Him it is possible I should live, but how could it happen that He should come hither, so many hundred miles o’er hill and vale and desert and sea, for the sake even of a queen?” So she spoke and was silent, and yet was not without hope. And those around her were sad, and they waited for the queen to say more. But the queen lay still and spoke no more, and with a strange thought of comfort her feeble body and spirit slid gently into sleep. Sweetly and gently her eyes and soul closed to the day, and her night eyes and soul opened to the night. She dreamed. She dreamed, and then even her dreaming self fell asleep.
In the morning she opened her eyes and remembered that she had dreamed, and she remembered a voice in the dream, and a face and a promise. She remembered the strange words that had been spoken to her dreaming self—“Andray, the painter, shall bring you the face that shall save you from all harm.”
The queen bade heralds sound for Andray, the painter. They sounded, and a painter, Andray by name, was found, and they brought him before the queen. Then, when he was come, and he stood before the pale queen, she told him the purport of the dream, and told him of the tidings of that Jesus of Galilee whose comfort her soul craved. Andray understood his quest—that he should paint the face—and that day, ere the sun set, he departed on his long journey. His long travelling commenced. Far over hill and vale and sea and desert he journeyed to the Holy Land, there to see the Saviour and paint the face that should save the queen.
And a high faith held the pale queen between life and death during the intervening weeks, and a kindred faith bore Andray through hardship and peril and the fear of man and of beast. The commotion and stir and rumour with regard to the Saviour grew noisier as Andray came nearer Palestine. At length he arrived.
Jesus was teaching among the people, living in His heart the life of everyone He saw, living from His heart in living veins over the whole earth. Of the queen He knew in His heart, and of her faith, and of the painter and his faith, and He in His own heart had the fulfilment of each, the answer to each. And as part of that answer, on the day on which Andray arrived, He stood upon a slope teaching, and below Him were a thousand people, listening, calling, reviling, praying, and the disciples were bringing sick people to and fro at the Master’s feet. So great was the crowd that Andray found it impossible to get near, or he was too tired to struggle through. So he climbed the opposite hill, that which faced the one whereon Jesus was working, for the people were in a valley between two hills. And from that eminence Andray had a perfect view of the face that he needed to paint.
So the painter settled down to make his study, and he found the face such a subject as he had never yet imagined, such a face as was only one with his highest dream of an ideal, one with the fleeting fancy of the golden moment of his greatest love. Eagerly he drew—eagerly for a moment—and then stopped in perplexity. There was something wrong; he put aside his first attempt and eagerly started a second. But the second also he put aside, and started a third; and a fourth and a fifth he started, for he found that directly he traced a line it was wrong. The slightest feature that he drew seemed at once a lie. For the living face of the Teacher changed constantly, like the flash of the sun on the waves; it was not one face only that he saw, but a thousand faces; not a thousand faces only, but every face, and even for a moment his own face.
Jesus knew that he was there, and had marked him where he sat at work upon the opposite hill. And now He beckoned to him, and Andray gave up his efforts and made his way down the slope. Then one of the disciples found him at the edge of the crowd and brought him to the throng, to the place where Jesus was teaching. And when he was brought Jesus looked at him and said, “My face may not be drawn by hands, lest in the days to come man should say this only is the likeness of Christ. There is not one face alone for all, but for each man his own vision. There is one common knowledge for all, that only the heart may know. What wouldest thou then?”
“I would that I had the likeness that alone can save my queen.”
Then Jesus took a towel and pressed it to His face, and then gave it to Andray. And on the towel was imprinted a strange likeness of Christ. And all who looked upon the picture marvelled, for there was in it portraiture such as never painter’s hand could follow. And Andray gazed, rapt, upon the living, breathing treasure that was his, and he marvelled at the depth and plenitude of power and love that breathed from its unfathomable calm; it seemed a myriad souls were merged in one face. And he looked questioningly at the thorn crown upon the head and the blood marks on the brow, for in such guise was the face portrayed. There was much in the picture that was as yet hidden from his heart.
This was the face that Andray, the painter, brought from Palestine, which restored to life the pale queen, and which, set in the holy seat of the capital, wrought many wonders and miracles. It is told that Andray, though his paintings are now lost, became the most wonderful painter, and his fame went throughout the land; for before taking away the Ikon of Christ he had received a blessing. At parting Jesus breathed on the eyes of the painter, and said, “Thou couldest not find My face for the reflection there of the soul of the common man. Behold now, thou shalt not look upon the face of any common man but thou shalt find My face there also.”
I liked the priest’s legend and probably read much more in it than he intended. Indeed, he seemed mildly surprised at my enthusiastic inquiries as to points in the story. Shortly after he concluded the lamp burned out, and as he had no more oil we went to bed. And I slept very soundly, for I had had a stiff day’s walk, and had not slept particularly well since I left Vladikavkaz.
Next day I was awakened by the sun full in my face. It was time to go out. I left the priest fast asleep and went out to see the Kazbek Mountain. The air was so cold that it was necessary to run to keep warm even though the sun shone. There was mist on the mountains and the sun was fighting it. Far distant peaks looked immense and elemental, like chaotic heaps awaiting the creation of a world. And the conquering sun was creating all things anew, and momentarily all around me the gems of the earth were, as it were, answering adsum to the morning roll-call. Hyacinth and iris glittering with dew crept out of the wet scrub and gleamed in the sunlight, and fritillary butterflies came flitting down upon the blossoms.
Then above me rose the majestic mountain to which in old time Prometheus, as the story goes, was bound, Mount Caucasus, the wonder of the way. Its high-born pinnacle of snow seemed to have riven the very sky itself, and was all glistering white, as if catching the radiance of another world. Mount Kazbek seemed a god; the other mountains were men. The other mountains were like grandfathers, hoary old men who wanted children playing at their knees. They enticed me. Grandfathers are very fond of their children’s children.
CHAPTER XVI
AT A MILL ON THE TEREK
THE yard cocks are at feud. There has been some harem trouble and so this is a day of war. Since first crow they have been tumbling over one another, shedding the red gore and eyeing one another terribly. Now, at four of the afternoon, they both show signs of strife. Their grand plumage is dirty, their combs soiled and ugly, their necks gory, their eyes bloodshot and terrible. Their wives, however, seem placid—almost indifferent. Unhappy is the lot of rival Sultans!
There are intervals between the battles, intervals of rest and crowing. Poor Abdul Hamid sits below me and groans with pain, whines almost like a dog. But in a minute “time’s up,” he goes out and challenges and again is bloodily overcome. Their claws are bloody, for they strike at one another with their feet. They jump at one another, balancing themselves and flapping their wings and try to roll each other in the dust. Truly it is no wonder there is cock-fighting in Russia when the birds behave like this when left to themselves. And it is a most interesting spectacle albeit not Christian.
KAZBEK MOUNTAIN, FROM THE NORTH-WEST
Whilst they are eyeing one another terribly and furtively, and it looks doubtful whether Abdul will continue the battle or will abdicate, Alimka, the yard urchin, steals up behind the victor and suddenly pulls one of his tail feathers. Consternation! But in a moment they are back again, beak to beak, and the ruby blood is flowing. A black hen is now in attendance, and risks having her eyes peeked out in her greedy endeavours to drink up the blood that is dropping on the ground.
This is happening in the yard of a mill where I am staying. I came here yesterday in a cart from the mountains, and I have given up the quest of a cottage for this summer. I have taken two rooms here, and although they are unfurnished they will suit my purposes. It is on the banks of the Terek, and presently I shall have to go to the river to fetch water for tea.
I had been wandering some days among the Georgian villages near Kobi, when one morning I came into the Georgian Road again and there met a Russian driving a three-horse cart. He seemed badly in want of company, so I consented to get in with him. We had the following conversation.
“How do you pray?” asked he.
“What do you mean?” I replied.
“Are you orthodox?”
“I am not Russian,” I replied, “and I don’t belong to the Russian church.”
“What then? You are Esthonian, eh? Or a Tsech?”
“No, English.”
“English! Impossible! You have a moustache, no Englishman has a moustache.”
“I am English all the same.”
“Then you are a Protestant. I’m a Baptist.”
“Then we are brothers,” I replied.
“But how do you pray? Do you cross yourself? We pray so.” He showed me how he prayed, folded his hands on his stomach, and shut his eyes.
“I understand,” I replied. “We pray like that, but we kneel also, and some of our Protestants cross themselves also.”
He looked shocked but went on:
“Where do you live? You ought to come to our gatherings. There are many of us here now since the Declaration.”
He was referring to M. Stolypin’s Ukase of October 1908, which granted freedom to all religious sects in the Empire. I told him I was not living anywhere in particular, but that I had been tempted to take a Georgian cottage at a place called Pkhelshi, which had been offered me at ten roubles a month. My only doubt was of the cleanliness of the place. I was afraid of being eaten up by insects. The Baptist was horrified.
“Afraid of insects!” said he. “Better be afraid of getting your throat cut. No, you leave it to me; I know where you can go. I’ll take you to our pastor, he has a mill on the river. He is a very good man and very humble. You go and live with him, he won’t take more than five roubles.”
So I had come to the mill and put my things there, and made it my abode for the time being. The driver of the cart was very proud of his find, and introduced me to the miller with not less mystery and secrecy than he would have unwrapped a gold nugget which he might have picked up on the mountains. The host took me over and the other bade me farewell; we should meet again at one of their “gatherings.”
I had two rooms but no furniture. The miller found me a table and I used a box to sit on. I bought a mattress at a “bazaar” in Vladikavkaz, and a German oil-stove and glasses and saucers and plates and a saucepan, and a wooden spoon to stir my soup, and metal spoons to eat it and sup it, and some knives and a fork. I also bought a penny broom to sweep the floors and some muslin to make a curtain. Setting up house on my own account for the first time was a matter of great excitement. In case anyone might like to try a similar experiment let me write here the prices I paid:
| Mattress | 6 shillings |
| Oil-stove (of the Beatrice kind) | 7 shillings |
| 2 buckets | 2 shillings |
| 2 saucers, 4 plates, 2 glasses | 1 shilling |
| Saucepan | 2 shillings |
| Tea-pot and hot-water jug | 1 shilling |
| A broom, padlock, nails | 1 shilling |
| A shopping-basket | 6 pence |
and the muslin cost 8d., and two tins for washing purposes cost 1s. 6d. The other people were very interested in my place, but did not seem surprised at the deficiencies. A Russian woman promised to do my washing, and my neighbour, a Persian, offered me water from his samovar whenever I required it.
It was an interesting ménage, and left me free to go out into the mountains whenever I wished. I could leave my things behind and be perfectly sure they were safe, and I could have a postal address. Food cost me about four shillings a week—for the cost of living was very low. Milk was 2d. a quart; new-laid eggs, 3d. a dozen; butter, 10d. a pound; lamb, 4d. a pound; beef, 3d. I lived on the fat of the land at four shillings a week, and on very hot days I would take my saucepan out to the ice-cream shop and get it full for sixpence, and then I would invite Alimka, the yard urchin, and his little sister, Fatima, to have tea with me.
One day Fatima and Alimka brought me a sparrow which they had caught. They had tied cotton to one of its legs and had been flying it as one would a kite. They did not understand cruelty; they thought I should be amused. So when I took it away they were fearfully enraged, and I offered them each a halfpenny, and Alimka took his, but Fatima would not take it; she would have the sparrow back, it was hers. She screamed, and I thought she was going to have a fit. “Daviety,” she screamed, “give it back,” and put everything into that scream—mouth, face, head, feet, knees, body and red rag of a skirt; all shook and gaped and screamed, “Daviety.” She did not have her way, however, and little Jason, for so I named him, remained with me, and many a cheerful hour we spent together. For days I amused myself watching his convalescence. I caught flies for him and put them in his mouth, whereupon he gulped them down and chirped. He slept every night on the winter stove, and in the mornings he flew down and hopped on to my face and chirped, and then I would waken up and give him some sugar. I took him out and he hopped along at the side of me on the moors, and jumped and flew and caught flies for himself. Often he got lost and I could not find him, but after an hour or so, when I was lying down eating my lunch, or picking wild strawberries from a bank, he would hop again into view. He was a dear friend, my little Jason.
Of wild strawberries I made jam, as also of wild plums and cherries, and this was a great diversion. I offered some to Ali Khan next door, but he would not take any; perhaps it was part of his religion to refuse, for the jam was very tempting. Ali Khan made the Persians very interesting to me, especially as there were many Persians about and he was having one to tea almost every day.
The miller and his wife looked upon me with parental eyes. They were much astonished by my ability to do things for myself. The miller was generally known as the Hözain and his wife the Hözaika. The Hözaika stood and stared at me when I drew water from the river myself; she thought it not respectable that a man should do that, and when she came into my back room one day and found me washing handkerchiefs she fairly gasped. Poor Hözaika, she also had her tables of conventionalities.
CHAPTER XVII
THE GORGE OF DARIEL
LIVING in towns is enervating; it starves both gods and devils. There the half-gods of wit and conversation hold sway. One morning I put a sovereign in my pocket, slung my travelling bed over my shoulder, and resolved to see more of the mountains. The sovereign was in small change.
It was a dull, showery day, and the green trees clung to the mountain sides like soft plumage. I walked the whole day along the Georgian road and met no more than two people beyond the little crowd packed into the stage-coach. In the afternoon I entered the débris of Larse, where the famous road enters the great mountains, and I slept in the post-station within sight of the great Ermolovsky stone, famous for its size, and for a Russian poem which it inspired.
Next morning I felt that my journey had begun. For I was at the mouth of the Dariel Gorge. Two versts from the station was the little red bridge which clasps together the great rocks on either bank of the Terek. They call it, as was, I suppose, almost inevitable, the Devil’s Bridge, and it looks enchanted. It is overhung by gigantic cliffs, the great walls of the corridor of the gorge. The river which rushes underneath is something incomparably stronger than the bridge itself; it is a monster wallowing, plunging, roaring, thundering, lifting up a hundred dirty heads. No horse or man would stand a chance in its current; even the great glacial boulders, weighing tons, are rolled over and over by its waves, and, shutting one’s eyes, one listens to an uproar as of the heaviest streetful of traffic on Cheapside.
I think May is the best time to see the gorge, of a morning at dawn. I was there before the sun had risen. It was then indeed what a Russian has called it, “A fairy tale in twelve versts.” There is little verdure there except the grass, but the tops of the cliffs are snow-crested, and just below the snow one sees, far away, the hoar-frosted tops of woods. Below that are two or three thousand feet of rock, brown with withered grass, but brightened here and there by the greenest fir trees. At the base the tortured rock seems wrought in cyphers and frescoes, all twisted and lined as if a great history had been told in hieroglyphics and letters that only some past civilisation had been able to understand. But, as someone has said, “Odin has engraved runes upon all visible things—a divine alphabet intelligible only to the thinking spirit.”
The cliffs are crowned here and there by the ruins of old towers, and the castle of Queen Tamara still stands, a grim survival from the twelfth century when many crimes were accomplished there. One still sees the stairway in the rock along which unfortunate victims used to be taken to be hurled into the foaming river. Even below the ruins the clefts hold snow, and one sees a rivulet of snow and ice descending to become a cascade of bright water. From the river to the sky the whole is harmonised by moss and lichen and ancient greyness. It is a place where the stupendous majesty of Nature troubles the soul, where one feels oppressed by the immanence of powers greater than oneself, where one knows in one’s heart how small and feeble is the little earth-born creature Man beside those powers which have fashioned the Universe and which move in the fir-hearts of worlds.
I sat on a stone and looked up. The perfectly blue sky was spread across like a roof. The sun had risen, but would not shine in upon me for hours. Meanwhile I watched the light descending from the mountains, and the sharp shadow picture of the rocks on my side thrown on the rocks of the other. The shadow was gradually climbing down.
How clearly all sounds can be distinguished there! The rocks preserve even the whisper. I notice that when one comes out of the open into the shelter of a gorge all sounds are trebled in volume and in distinctness. One becomes aware of the music of the wind, the roar of the distant torrent; even the little rivulets trickling down from the snow-drifts have a voice that reaches the ear. The waterfalls have two voices, the first a roar, and the second which the listener hears as a secret treble.
I walked on uphill past the boundary line into Trans-Caucasia, past the Government fort and the first free wine-inn of the new territory—the Russians have allowed the vodka monopoly to lapse in Trans-Caucasia—and came to the Devdorak glacier with its long file of snow and ice. Here there was a large pile of snow on the road, hard, firm snow six feet deep. It had dropped from the heights. I walked on top of it, and it was so hard that I did not even make foot-prints. A man would stand a bad chance against a falling drift.
At Devdorak is the Alexandrovsky Bridge, and I crossed the Terek once more and came to the sunny side of the gorge. A hot sun shone and a bracing wind rushed round the corners of the serpentine road. Butterflies purple and brown disported themselves, and where the water oozed through the porphyry the rocks were festooned with flowers.
DARIEL GORGE: CASTLE OF QUEEN TAMARA AND RUSSIAN FORTRESS
CHAPTER XVIII
AT A VILLAGE INN
OUTSIDE Kazbek village two sheep-dogs came up with a great show of ferocity, but I pacified them. I have discovered that they only do this because they are starved, and that if one aims them a bit of bread they become like lambs. The natives’ practice is perhaps more efficacious. They pick up as big a piece of rock as they can find, and hurl it point blank at the beast’s head. I only counsel the reader, should he find himself in such a predicament and not have bread, to offer them a stone.
I slept the night at the post-station at Kobi. Next morning, when I went out to an inn to get some tea, it was snowing, which rather surprised me, seeing that the day before had been so hot.
The inn is one of eight shops in Kobi. The innkeeper was of course delighted to see me. A customer in May is a rarity. I had hardly seated myself when a Russian lounger pounced on me and asked me the usual series of questions about my name, nationality, destination, business and so forth. He was dressed in home-made sheepskin trousers and a Russian national shirt.
“Ah,” said he, “the Englishmen know where all the gold and copper is, and the oil; they’ve got it all mapped out. The English know all. The Russians keep all—that, my friend, is politics. The Caucasus is the brightest brilliant in the Russian crown. We shall keep it to the last. When all the rest is worked out we shall begin. Here there is everything: gold, silver, coal, copper, iron—what you like. Why, I know villages where there is wild petroleum; it spurts out naturally, and the natives have used it for years for cooking and lighting. Here at Kobi we have seltzer water so strong that no one can bottle it, and we drink it by the pailful. Full of iron, my friend, that’s what makes us all strong. Nobody ever dies here; that’s because of our springs.”
Whilst I was having my tea I got him to speak of the road. He was evidently a chatterbox.
“They spend ten thousand roubles a year on the road,” said he. “But that is nearly all absorbed by overseers and generals; the poor working men get little.”
“That also is politics,” said I.
“Yes, we are all very poor,” put in the innkeeper. “Eight shops we have, and not one makes more than threepence a day profit. You see we have eight months winter.”
“It will be better soon,” I urged. “The summer is coming. But I see you don’t know much about business. Now I know comparatively little about trade, but my little finger knows better than you do how to manage a shop like this.”
The shopkeeper blinked his eyes; he was an Ossetine. Then the little man in the sheepskin trousers broke in, “You would like to introduce American methods, but you don’t understand how poor they are. They never have any money in the winter. You couldn’t get change for a rouble in the whole village now. They spend all they get in the summer, and live on credit all the winter. They owe you a fortune, Achmet, I’ll be bound.”
“It is only too true,” assented the shopkeeper.
The little man went on: “Why, they even buy two calf-skins of wine in the autumn when they have money, and that lasts the family through the winter. Not even an Englishman could do trade here.”
“Well,” I said, “what I meant was, soon the summer will be here, and crowds of Georgians and Armenians, Russians and Persians will be on the road. Now, this being the first shop in the village, it stands best chance. But why does our friend call the inn a drapery establishment, and fill his window with oil-lamps and cheese?”
The shopkeeper smiled with pride, and pointed out that he was the only draper and lamp-seller in the village. Whereupon I went on instructing him.
“If you are the only draper, then everyone in the village knows that fact, and there is no need to paint it up as your sign. But travellers don’t want to buy drapery or lamps. What you need to do is to write up in big letters,
INN
VARIOUS DRINKS
WINE
SAMOVAR READY
HOT SOUP.
Then you’d make more than threepence a day. You ought to try and get Russian visitors here: have some rooms that could be let as lodgings, talk about the ozone in the air and the springs in the rocks.”
They listened solemnly, and the innkeeper promised to paint out his “drapery” sign. I had four glasses of tea. I purchased two pounds of bread for my journey, and all this cost but fivepence. Still, if he had no more customers that day I supposed his takings would be up to the average. I am sure they had a lively topic of conversation for days to come about a real Englishman who had shown them the way to make the village a “going concern.”
It was interesting to observe the impression made by the announcement that I was an Englishman. Englishmen are rather a myth in these parts. The wonders of London and New York must be taken on trust, without vouchers, like the miracles of the Bible, and I daresay that when one of us does turn up they take him as a sign which is not only sufficient guarantee for the reality of modern civilisation, but also for any points in their religion of which they may have doubt. It is, however, much more likely that they would doubt civilisation than the Bible, and they would accept the authenticity of Elijah’s chariot sooner than that of flying machines.
CHAPTER XIX
“THROUGH SNOW AND ICE”
I TOOK the road to the Krestovy Pass. The clouds lowered, and there was the promise of much snow. It was bitterly cold, and the mountains in front were dressed from head to foot in white robes. Two versts from Kobi an avalanche had fallen recently, so that the road would have been impossible but for an emergency tunnel that had providently been constructed at that point. Fifty men were at work shovelling snow into the river-valley, which was itself piled up in bergs of snow. I wondered what was in store for me at the higher points of the road.
The snow came thick and fast, and the wind blew the tops of the drifts in my face. The snowy mountain sides seemed to faint as the clouds came over them. The river below me was absolutely hidden from view, but it rushed rapidly under the snow. They say the snow never completely melts from this river-bed, even in the hottest seasons.
I fastened my waterproof sleeping-sack about my person, for it was so cold. The road had now on each side of it an eight-foot wall of piled-up and drifted snow, and in this wall little snow caves had been dug out to allow the traveller or workman to take shelter in storms. I was among the elements, high up among the snowy peaks, with snow above and below. To the horizon ran curve after curve of undulating snow. Yet as I stood and listened I heard larks singing. There must be sheltered valleys somewhere.
Five miles from Kobi the road was completely closed to vehicular traffic by an immense heap of avalanche snow, fifty yards across. Over the chaos was a track fairly secure for pedestrians. Now and then one went up to the knee in loose snow. It was a grand pile which an English schoolboy would revel in.
I marvelled at the new world I had so suddenly entered. As the road grew higher all became whiter, till earth and sky were one and there was no dividing line. I felt among the clouds themselves. At Krestovy Pass there was no view to be seen—the hurrying storm closed in everything about my eyes. I looked downward into an abyss of snow and cloud. Then for a moment the storm seemed to be hurrying away from me. The snow ceased to fall on the road where I stood, but in front of me rushed in the gale. I saw the lines of distant precipices, and beyond, the peculiar greyness of the storm. Then the snow returned, and the wind was like to take one’s ears off. The snow rushed past with extraordinary velocity. Often now the road was banked up fifteen feet with snow, so that one was in a sheltered passage. Coming once more into the open, I found the storm had slackened. A beam of the sun shot through, and showed behind the flakes tall, ghostly mountains with seams of awful blackness, where from their steep sides the snow had fallen away.
From the overtopping snow banks on the road hung icicles a yard long, and the walls of the dark emergency tunnels were sheeted with ice. In one of these near Gudaour the ice against the rock wall was fifteen feet high and three to eight feet thick. Huge icicles ten feet long hung from the roof. The tunnel was a fairy grotto. At the foot of the icicles were piles of little ice marbles where the frozen walls had thawed; the fanciful person might call them jewels. The whole was lovely to look at, for the outside surface of the ice was glittering lacework.
I was now going lower and I noticed that it was milder—the snow was not so dry, and the roadway was wet and muddy. I witnessed an extraordinary phenomenon, the road steaming from the heat of the sun shining through the clouds, and yet the snow falling heavily all the time.
AKHTSAURI GLACIER, KAZBEK
The descending road has a sheer precipice on one side, and the abyss might tempt the will of some people if they ventured near the edge. It was a strange sight to see the snow-flakes being blown upward out of the valley of the River Aragva. I looked down three thousand feet and saw the pleasant green of the south country. I looked up to the north and saw the mountains cloaked and grim, like sentinels sitting at their posts.
Gudaour looked like the outskirts of Moscow in midwinter. The snow was piled up on each side of the road and on the cottage roofs. One would have said it was the month of January for certain.
I had two glasses of milk at one of the inns, and still felt in very good form for continuing on the road. It was an immediate descent, at first through slush of snow, and then over mud, and finally along a dry, hard highway. A thousand feet below the village it was raining; the weather was decidedly mild. At one spot it seemed to me I had located a type of English weather. But for the mountains it might have been a wet February day in Essex.
Then I found again wild snowdrops and violets, and the blackthorn was in bud. Two thousand feet below there were cowslips and lilies, and there, to my joy, the hot sun came out and clothed the spring in sparkles. I slipped down to Mleti and found the summer there.
CHAPTER XX
LAVRENTI CHAM KHOTADZE
“Thy form was plump, and a light did shine
In thy round and ruby face,
Which showed an outward visible sign
Of an inward spiritual grace.”—Peacock.
MLETI stands on the White Aragva, a beautiful river of clear water, lifting thousands of white foaming ripples. A Russian poet has written:
“Day and night runs the Aragva unweariedly over the stones,
And golden fish dart under the sapphire waves.”
The road goes through the valley of the Aragva for a distance of thirty miles through Pasanaour and Ananaour. I went on towards the first-named village, expecting to sleep there that night. But the unexpected happened. About two versts from Mleti I was sitting by the roadside when a priest came flying past me in a cart. He was shouting and singing, going downhill as fast as horse could carry him, and his long black hair streamed in the wind. Half-standing, half-sitting in the cart, he flourished a cudgel over the racing horse. When he saw me he made a movement to stop, but he was going too fast to pull up.
It was beginning to rain, and I promised myself to take shelter at the next inn along the road. I passed Arakhveti, a typical Georgian village, having an old church with a temporary tower of hay, and old hand-carved Ikons outside the door. There were a few cottages of the common type, having stone foundations and an upper storey of basket-work. A mile beyond this I came to a Dukhan, the first wine-house since Mleti. And there I saw the priest again.
He was sitting at a table outside the inn drinking wine with a party of Georgians. A pitcher was in the middle of the table and glasses all round. He hailed me and said he would willingly have driven me had he known in which direction I was going, and bade me sit down and drink wine. Asked from what province I came, I replied that I was English, which evidently made a great impression, though they immediately took the aspect of having met Englishmen every day of their lives. I subsequently learned that I was the first they had seen.
They spoke among themselves in the Georgian tongue, evidently discussing the democratic institutions of Great Britain, and then the priest said to me, “They keep us down, they don’t educate us; they forbid us to have schools; they call us savages. What do you think of us Georgians—aren’t we an unhappy nation? I myself am not an educated man. I finished the seminary, and then the Russian teacher said, ‘Georgian, that is a dog’s language,’ and I gave up learning. But these,” said he, pointing to his companions, “are as ignorant as the sheep, they know nothing. I proposed to build a school out of that old ruined barracks—it would have cost nothing; we ourselves could have built it, and I wrote a petition, but the Archbishop wrote back saying education wasn’t necessary.”
He bawled this speech at the top of his voice and shook his abundant black hair. His name, as I learnt afterwards, was Lavrenti Cham Khotadze; he was a handsome man, tall and strong, with red face and flashing eyes; his dense black eyebrows were too near together, so that when he was excited he looked mad. He had a fine long beard and a Roman nose. Over the wine cups he was certainly very uproarious, whatever he may have been in his church, and he emphasised his opinions by striking the table with his whole forearm. From head to foot he was enveloped in a dark blue cloak fastened with a belt at his middle.
A very dangerous political conversation ensued, and we drank a series of revolutionary toasts, one being that of the enemies of Russia—might they soon overcome her, and so let the Georgians gain possession of the Caucasus once more! They seemed to think that I might write to the English papers and fan up political animosity, and so help to bring about a European war, which would give the Tsar so much to do that the Caucasus would be enabled to gain its independence. They wished me to set the world on fire “to boil the Kaiser’s eggs,” as the saying is.
The rest of the party were well-dressed Georgians, but they did not enter into the conversation further than to confirm what the priest said. They were rather deficient in Russian. The priest himself a little discouraged the use of the Slavonic tongue, and made many malicious mistakes in his pronunciation when he used it himself. He constantly referred to the teacher who had called Georgian “sobatchy yasik”—dog’s language—and he said to me, “Did God mean all people to be alike, I ask you?”
I replied that I thought not.
“You are not a Mahometan,” asked one of the men; “you profess Jesus Christ; you are orthodox?”
I assented. “Orthodox” in Russia is as wide a term as “Christian.”
“Well,” said the priest, “God didn’t intend us all to speak the same tongue or He would have given all the same sort of faces. Now, look at my face, you can’t call it Russian.”
One of the party pulled a grey hair from the pope’s head, and there was much laughter. But one of the men said to me seriously:
“Don’t think that we are irreverent; we are only joking, we are so happy to have met you.”
This man was a carpenter and he put his personal case to me.
“Now, I am a carpenter,” said he. “My father was a carpenter; we make no progress. Motor-cars come along the road. I don’t understand them, but it is possible to understand them. If they taught me mechanics I could make them. Motor-cars weren’t made by God, were they? They weren’t even made by generals. Working men like myself made them. And haven’t I got eyes, hands and brain as they?”
This was truly a beautiful utterance of its kind, and said with a touching simplicity that won the heart.
Uproarious Lavrenti rushed on:
“And the war against Japan which cost millions! What do you think of their making the Caucasians pay taxes? Why should we pay; did we order the war? Did we fight it? Let those who ordered pay. Now, if they’d sent me instead of old Kuropatkin, you’d have seen.”
We drank a few more toasts and then it became time to go. There was one round more in the pitcher; the priest poured out a glass each and we all stood up whilst the last toast was proposed.
“The Mother of God save us!”
We drank it solemnly, but I heard one man add “some time or other.” Whereupon the priest laughed whimsically.
Lavrenti asked me to accompany him in his cart and sleep the night at his house. On the way he showed me his church—a chaste white chapel with a little green dome; it holds a hundred people, never more, and had been built in the ancient time when Rurik was Tsar of Russia. It has its own Georgian Ikons, though the Russians have taken out the precious stones.
His village was Nadiban. We did not get there before dark, but I heard the music of the guitar, and saw the youths and maidens of the village dancing the lezginka. I went into the poverty-stricken dwelling of the pope and saw his many little children. It was evident that his wife grumbled at him for bringing me home, and indeed there was no accommodation for visitors. The poor woman felt shamed. They made a bed up for me in a manger of the stable, and Lavrenti apologised, quoting that somewhat out-of-date proverb that “poverty is no sin,” adding that Christ Himself had slept in a manger, and so perhaps I would not object. His wife sent in a pillow and a quilt. I wrapped myself up in my bed, and despite the snoring of a sheep with a cold, and the attempts of an ox to browse off my toes, I slept the sleep which is often denied to the just.
CHAPTER XXI
ON THE ROAD TO TIFLIS
I TOOK my leave of Lavrenti at dawn and set out for Pasanaour. A man with an ox-dray picked me up two miles from the priest’s dwelling, and carried me ten miles at a pace slower than that of walking. The driver belonged to a tribe dwelling on the Black Aragva, consisting of about thirty thousand souls with a quite alien language and distinct customs, the Khevsurs. For one thing, they take their wives for a year on probation before marrying them. This man spoke no Russian, but a Georgian boy who was also being carried told me about him and his people. He pointed out how dirty he was, and showed a scar on his cheek and another on his wrist from knife wounds. The Khevsurs are a very quarrelsome tribe, and it is difficult to find a single grown man who has never been wounded. They live by shepherding and by wattle-making. Wattle is a very important manufacture in the Caucasus; houses and fences are made of it, and it is used for the embankments of the rivers.
GEORGIAN WOMEN
The ox-cart left the road at the confluence of the Black Aragva with the White, and I was on my feet again. Many people were on the road, and these were more or less of a wilder type than those I had yet seen. I observed that when a man and woman make a journey together, the woman rides astride on horseback and the man walks at her side. The favourite colour for dresses seems to be a cloudy crimson.
I found the road monotonously beautiful. The hills were wooded to the top, the landscape was graceful. Here were more pretty things than on the north side of the Caucasus. One might have been in a park. Nature did not seem entirely responsible for the scene; a painter might have planned the grouping and effects; the country was, in a word, picturesque. The road seemed endlessly long, and I grew a little tired of it. The sun, however, was bright and hot, and I made a siesta among some rocks below the shelter of the road. There, in a cleft, beside the clear, rushing stream, I had a washing hour. It is wonderful how well one can wash and dry a garment or so in an hour. I dabbled the things in the water, and rubbed them and spread them in the sun to dry. Meanwhile a wren kept coming to and fro on tip-toe with thatch for a little house she was building under the bridge.
At the same time I also made a meal of bread and sausage helped down with water. Mountain bread is not good, but it has one advantage—it may be kept any length of time without its quality being obviously impaired.
Along the road are many extremely ancient ruins, and also buildings of great antiquity still inhabited. Clearly things last well in the Caucasian climate. The castles and towers are but toys compared with Norman ruins; they would have vanished utterly in England. The walls are so thin and so poorly put together. It seems that warfare has been rather more of a game than with us. There have been no Cromwells there. The churches, however, are often surrounded by high battlemented walls, which suggests that though there were no Puritans there were robbers in plenty.
Near Ananaour a flock of sheep, about a thousand, were driven past. One solemn shepherd marched in front of his flock, and at the sides young men scolded and yelled and kept the order with long poles. It was a grand sight. I came into the village, where there is an old Byzantine church with a castellated wall, and went into a tavern to get some bread and cheese and wine. Two men were at the table eating soup from one wooden basin with only a single wooden spoon between them. It was not really soup, but such a collection as no Western person could face—boiled maize, garlic, raw sliced onion, water and soaked bread. The two men eating were evidently chums, for instead of using the spoon each for himself, they helped one another, and I was specially amused to watch the little bald man near me shovelling the mixture into the mouth of his tall, hairy companion. As they were drinking yellow wine and I red, the little bald man proposed a health, and we changed glasses. Whereupon the company, for there were many present, viewed me with the utmost cordiality, and I shared among them the superfluity of my cold brown pitcher.
I set off towards Dushet, but feeling tired I spread my travelling-bed on a grassy bank and fell asleep. When I awoke it was dark and cold, and the sky was in continuous sheet lightning. A damp breeze blew briskly upon me and I was anything but comfortable. I lay for hours half-dozing, but at length came to the conclusion that it was better walking. Accordingly I continued my walk to Dushet. It was two in the morning, and even so early the sky promised dawn from three sides. I had no notion of the compass.
Very leisurely I made that walk. Ten miles is only a short distance at night, and I did not wish to arrive too early at Dushet. I promised myself hot tea, and I must not come too early for it.
It was a strange night, starless, dark, full of flower odours. I wished to drink, but every mountain stream was chalky. I sat on many stones and scanned the sky, hoping for the dawn. Dogs barked at me, and even made to attack me, but of human kind I saw none. I passed a beautiful dusky plum tree laden with blossom—she was a woman.
About half-past four I came into the district town of Dushet, and at five o’clock behold me sitting in an inn waiting for the samovar. “It will be ready at once, in an hour,” the innkeeper had said. On the wall of the inn was a large coloured picture of the Last Judgment, the good being led by angels to heaven, and the bad being clawed down into hell by fiends; it was very realistic, and caused me to recall the lines:
“Hear all the pedants’ screeds and strictures
And don’t believe in anything
Which can’t be told in coloured pictures.”
The Georgians keep a good hot material hell in their conception of the hereafter.
The innkeeper was evidently only just up, and didn’t intend to serve customers before he had washed himself and put his shop in order. Accordingly, I watched his proceedings. He had a small wash, and combed his brown hair and moustache with two inches of comb, swept up the refuse from the floor, and put the empty bottles away. Large joints of mutton and beef hung from the roof—the man was also a butcher—and these he removed to a stall outside the shop. His wife slept in a bed in a gallery above the counter, and evidently slept too long, for her good man seemed to hurl imprecations at her from time to time.
At about half-past six the samovar, which had been “drawing” in the yard outside the shop, was brought in boiling, and I received what I had promised myself—four glasses of hot tea, the innkeeper’s charge for which was ten copecks—twopence halfpenny.
I had no intention of walking this day. When I had finished my breakfast I went half a mile along the road and then sat down by the wayside. A quarter of an hour later a van carrying hay came along, and the driver offered to take me to Tiflis for a rouble. I lay down on two bags of chaff and soon fell fast asleep.
After about two hours I wakened up to find myself in heavenly circumstances; beautiful hills, a hot sun, a cool breeze and a comfortable resting-place. The driver also lay on two sacks and slept. The three horses clattered ahead, evidently well knowing the way.
So all day we rolled easily over the road as in a coach. The land was rich and beautiful, and the sun glorified every beauty.
At Mtskhet, the ancient capital of Georgia, we stayed for an hour, and I rested at a shop whose owners had gone to Tiflis for the day. Two little girls were in charge, and they gave me a dish of fish without knife or fork, and on protest brought out a carving knife! The elder girl was only twelve years old.
In the twilight we sped along the banks of the Kuma and arrived at Tiflis.
CHAPTER XXII
A TWO-HUNDRED-MILE WALK
I WAS at Kutais in the beginning of May, and I walked from that town two hundred miles across the Caucasus to Vladikavkaz, which I am told is a notable feat. It will certainly remain very notable in my mind, both in respect of the sights I saw and of the adventures I survived. I ascended from the Italian loveliness of Imeretia, where the wild fruit was already ripening in the forests, to the bleak and barren solitudes of Ossetia, where I had to plough my way through ten miles of waist-deep snow. I was attacked by roughs at Gurshevi and escaped from them only to lose myself on the Mamison Pass, where I found the road overswept by a twelve-feet drift of snow. I spent the night with shepherds on the pass in a koutan, a shelter for cows and sheep, half-house, half-cave, made of stones and mud. A shepherd showed me a track over the snow next morning, and after five hours of the most arduous walking I ever did in my life I reached the other side of the Caucasus. But I arrived there only to have a new adventure. A heavy snowstorm had come on so that it was difficult to find the road, and at Lisri I inquired of a hillman lounging in the way. This man arrested me as a spy and asked ten shillings to release me, and since I refused to pay the bribe I was hailed before the Ataman to give an account of myself. Such account proving unsatisfactory, I was formally arrested, and in fact remained a prisoner for five days. Strangely enough I was hospitably entertained during my captivity by chiefs and priests, but the fifth night I spent actually in prison, in a dirty Caucasian gaol with two robbers and a madman.
The air of Kutais is pungent with the fragrance of honeysuckle and sweet-briar, rhododendron and azalea—it tickles the nose. I set off on a peaceful Sunday morning when a sun hotter than we ever know in England, even in July, was flooding the valley of the River Rion with a superabundance of light and heat. The road, eighty miles long from Kutais to Oni, is perhaps the most beautiful in Europe, and this morning, its forested mountains bathed in grey-green loveliness and garlanded with flowers, it was a vision of Paradise. As a Georgian priest had said to me, “When you get there you will see; it is summer, everything is perfectly beautiful. It is heaven. If one were sent there after death one would not be disappointed.”
I took it very easily this first beautiful day, and between dawn and sunset walked not more than twenty miles. The swallow-tail butterflies and large silver-washed fritillaries sipping honey from bush to bush probably strayed further than I did. I envied not at all the dozen people crammed into the Oni stage-coach—a vehicle constructed apparently out of currant boxes. In fact, the shorter distance traversed in a day the richer has been that day, one may say. The travellers on the stage-coach certainly didn’t make a supper off wild strawberries as I did. That was the reward of my first day’s sauntering. I found them that day. I did not find any more. The land became cooler and cooler, the next day and the next, till it was obvious I was travelling out of summer into winter again. But these strawberries were rich; they were nearly as large as thimbles, and I gathered about two pounds of them.
I slept that night under a rock a hundred feet above the road, and suffered no disturbance either from robbers or from bears. A soft rain plumped down just after sunset but I was in shelter. I slept, and indeed I could not say what happened that night beyond that the goddesses of sleep were gentle and kind to me. Just before dawn next morning I was awakened to hear the cuckoo calling from the dark forest opposite. Something in myself craved hot tea. I jumped up and took the road.
I swiftly walked the eight versts to Mekhven, where an innkeeper was taking down his shutters, and I persuaded the man to put up his samovar and give me tea. Tea is a luxury in these parts, for wine is the cheaper drink. It was no ordinary affair that a stranger should walk in at dawn and demand tea, and the innkeeper must have told at least ten villagers of the fact before he put a stick to the kettle. In five minutes his parlour was full of the curious. That I was English seemed to make a profound impression, but one man asked me whether our country was in the direction of Tiflis, and another whether it was nearer Persia or Japan. One thought Queen Victoria was on the throne; another asked if Russian was spoken in London, and were there many Georgians there. I had my tea, four glasses, and then drank the company’s health in a tumbler of red wine. They replied, wishing me health on the road, and an affecting reception when at last I reached my hearth and home; might the English prosper and their king live long over them!—no doubt to the gratification of the shopkeeper, who filled a large pitcher from a half-deflated calf’s skin under his counter. The population were of the sort “never deep in anything but wine.”
The succeeding day was also one of full abundant sunshine. My roadside companions were large yellow rock roses and wild geraniums. In the woods I observed wild walnut trees and raspberry bushes. What feasts were promised for the later summer! I went forwards towards Alpani, meeting many Svani upon the road, a rather wilder tribe than usual, and very ignorant of the Russian language. With many of these I shook hands, however, that seeming to be the custom on the road. Five miles beyond Mekhven three Russian tramp labourers, of the type Gorky represented, wanted me to accompany them, but I declined. It was not easy to keep clear of them, however, and we kept meeting one another throughout the day. This was a day of thirst, as indeed might be said of many succeeding days. White wine and lemonade, red wine with radishes and bread and salt—no shop seemed to purvey more solid fare, and the only alternative to wine was water. But there is water on the road better than in the shops. I may safely say that if I have sampled all their wines I have also tried all their waters and tasted all the rock salts. There must be at least a score of varieties of water along the road, from streams like dilute quinine and iron to foaming seltzer water. In several villages the people fill a bucket with seltzer water every morning. Its taste is best just as it comes out of the rock. Near Alagir the River Ardon is white with sulphur, for there is an immense gushing sulphur spring there, and a natural manufacture of sulphurous and sulphuric acid. I suppose before ten years have passed someone will have found it advantageous to work this spring. The appalling smell of sulphuretted hydrogen should be sufficient advertisement. Indeed, the richness of the land from an industrial point of view, and its lack of development, is a fact which is bound to strike a modern European with wonder. Handsome copper and silver ore and delicious-looking asbestite are to be found with scarcely straying from the road.
At Zhouetti I stepped into an inn, and when the people heard I was an Englishman they sent across the way to a factory there and brought a German to see me, Herr Petersen, and we drank white wine and lemonade. He judged I must be hungry since one could get nothing fit to eat in these parts, and so ran back and fetched a box of sardines. So with unleavened bread and hard-boiled eggs I made a rough lunch there. At the factory is prepared barite powder, used in the manufacture of chintz. Herr Petersen was very kind, but counselled me against the natives.
I slept that night under a wall in a barley field and was very cold, so the next night I chose a better place, in the snug shelter of an overhanging rock, and screened from view by a full blooming hawthorn bush.
On the third day it rained much, and I spent some hours in caves or under trees. The verdure had a different aspect in the wet, and I reflected as I waited that the spring is not advanced by rain, but it gathers strength in the rain to proceed more quickly when the sun comes out. So with the tramp!
CHAPTER XXIII
CLIMBING INTO WINTER
THE Khvamli Table Mountain seems to stand as a fort between the north and the south, and it is an extraordinary sight. Its uppermost two thousand feet are naked of verdure. The grey cliff, a mile long, rises sheer from the crests of a green forest and extends in a regular battlemented array, which suggests a great city wall. On one side of that mountain I found summer, and on the other winter.
It was an extraordinary experience to climb out of an almost tropical summer into a land where the trees were only just budding, and the snowdrop and crocus were in bloom, and where the snow had not yet melted from the road. I had started on a Sunday when the weather approximated to that of July; on Friday I had reached March, and on Saturday I was in mid-winter.
I passed through Oni, an unusual town, in which scarcely a new house has been built since the twelfth century, and which is now inhabited by a tribe of mountain Jews living in peculiar isolation. This was on Thursday afternoon, and I spent the night in an inn nine miles north, at the little town of Utsera, now fast becoming a popular health resort though a hundred miles from a railway station. It is about the height of Mount Snowdon, on the fringe of an ancient pine forest. At Utsera it was raining on the Friday morning. At the next village, Glola, a thousand feet higher, the rain was changed for sleet. The road ascends through a fir wood said to be the grandest in the Caucasus; the pines are as broad-trunked as some of our famous oaks, and they rise straight as a die to almost incredible height. Their ancient hoariness and greyness add to their majestic appearance.
I was now nearing the neck of the mountains and stormy Mamison. The Rion, broad at Kutais, was here but a small torrent. The road, if such it can be called, was traversed by many cascades and broken away by rocks and rivers, so that a horseman could pass only with difficulty. To vehicular traffic it was completely closed. Sitting at any point of the road one could count literally scores of uprooted pines. Above Glola the sun came out, the same hot Caucasian sun, though tempered by the cold air, and, as if to pretend that summer was there, the Camberwell Beauty butterfly (of name obviously not universal) flitted to and fro flaunting its purple and gold. Under the pine trees were wild snowdrops thick clustered, and on the roadway even little purple crocuses.
The road became difficult to manage, two bridges having been entirely washed away. I had at one point to leap fifteen feet on to a black snowdrift, which I feared might give under me. But I succeeded and won my way to Gurshevi. That was the first village of the Ossetines, and had generally a bad name. Some years ago an explorer and two guides disappeared entirely in this region, and have never been heard of since. And I had an adventure there which greatly alarmed me. I had not stopped at the village; it was difficult of access, being upon a cliff, and I strode forward toward the pass. But a verst forward on the road I was hailed from a distance by four roughs, who demanded a rouble. I hurried on. They called “Stop!” But I paid no attention, seeing that they were extremely heavily clad and could not hope to catch me up; they were in a valley about five hundred feet below. The road, however, was extraordinarily tortuous, and if I had only climbed straight up the cliff to the pass I should have saved myself at least five miles walking, and my encounter with the roughs into the bargain. They were able to cut me off and get into hiding among the boulders and rocks above the road. My position was sufficiently dangerous, but I did not guess their intention; they had no guns. Fortunately I caught sight of one of them running from one rock to another, and when I came to the district I stopped short and demanded of my hidden enemies what they wanted. For answer a large lump of rock came whizzing through the air within two inches of my head. Had I been struck I should have been stunned. Whilst I was deliberating a second followed, almost more terrifying than the first, and coming with great force, being hurled from above. No one was to be seen. There was but one thing to do. I lifted up my legs and sprinted.
I did not cease running till I was well up the pass and in a region where there were no loose rocks to be found. The snowy peaks had now become unveiled, and the fir forest was left behind. I thought that if I hurried I might get over the pass that day. My assailants were far behind. I did not fear another ambush. What was my surprise, however, to see suddenly in front of me two men walking towards me. Their dog rushed at me. I received him with equanimity, being much more afraid of men than of beasts. They told me there was no road for ten versts and would not be for a month, and they advised me to go back to Gurshevi. I listened with trepidation and could not believe what they said. I agreed to their advice, however, but said I would rest a little as I was very tired, and bade them go on in front. When they were out of sight I left the road abruptly and struck straight up the turfy bank towards the pass. I crossed the circuitous road three times and came to the region of continuous unmelted snow. I dragged myself through a mile of “slosh,” where a profusion of yellow water-lilies were growing, and for the best part of an hour I strove to find the road again. When I found it and followed it I came rapidly to snow too soft and deep to pass; indeed, twenty yards in front the road was perfectly lost in the snow, unmarked by undulation or rift in the even whiteness.
I was desperate, but I felt sure there was a way, for I had heard of hillmen coming from Utsera, and had been even counselled to wait for a companion there. I resolved to get a shepherd to show me the way, and with that in view climbed awkwardly downhill to the turfy region, where a flock was browsing. Yes, there was a way—one quite different from the road; an Ossetine shepherd offered to show me for a shilling. I agreed on condition that he first gave me a glass of milk, for I was exhausted and had eaten nothing since morning. This man was friendly enough, but on consideration he thought it impossible to show me that night. I should have to wait until next morning. I might sleep with them in their koutan if I didn’t mind the filth; they would make a bonfire and a big supper. His mate, Gudaev, would play the fiddle; I could sing. He would roast two quails which Achmet had killed; they would all have a jolly evening, and to-morrow morning very early he would take me and show me the track. Very thankfully I agreed.
CHAPTER XXIV
A NIGHT IN A KOUTAN
CHEKAI and his companion shepherds living in the koutan were clad in rags that were extremely dirty, their faces red, unshaven and wild, and their feet and legs bare, except of dirt. They were extremely apologetic. “You are clean,” said Gudaev, “but God has given us to work in filth, as you see, but we are men and Christian Ossetines.” I put them at their ease with a smile and went to inspect the koutan. It was an extensive dwelling, for the most part dug out of the mountain side. The walls were made of boulders plastered wind-tight with stable filth, the roof of pine branches, peat and hay. There were no windows, and so the whole had no light beyond what came in at the door, or from the hole in the roof; but what light there was sufficed to show that the house was divided by fences into a number of compartments for the reception of horses, cows, sheep and goats.
One of these compartments, in the shelter of a ponderous rock, was the shepherds’ own room. Three bits of fir trunk made the seats, and between these trunks and the walls were the beds of hay where they slept. Under the rock the red-grey embers of last night’s fire still smouldered. I went in and sat down, being tired and cold after my wanderings in the wet snow on the pass. Chekai and his companions milked the cows, brought in the horses and the sheep, separated and drove into separate pens the rams, the ewes and the lambs, so that the dark koutan became full of the cries of animals. I myself assisted in the separating of the sheep, for Chekai, who had asked my name, kept calling out, “Stepan, come here,” “Stepan, go there,” and I was fain to obey.
Achmet brought me the two quails he had killed, and showed me them with pride. He must have been a sure marksman with stones, and I thought with some ruefulness of my recent encounter when I had been somewhat in the position of the poor quails, but I said nothing. Gudaev, having milked the cows, took up the business of hacking firewood out of a tough pine log. In his intervals of rest he brought armfuls of wet branches and put them on the fire. I was given a wooden basinful of fresh milk, which Achmet had strained through hay before giving me. Presently the animals were all housed and a bonfire made up on the rude hearth. Clouds had crawled once again into the evening sky, there was a flash of lightning and a long roll of thunder; the dancing hailstones rushed down, and following them thick, soft, flaky snow. I was glad I had not tried to cross the pass that night.
A KOUTAN
It was very dark, and the wet wood was filling the koutan with smoke, but Chekai, who had cut up a great number of little sticks, made a brilliant illumination by setting fire to them. They had a contrivance of tin about three feet from the ground, and in this they burned the resinous pine splinters for hours. At length the brushwood burst into flame and dried and caught the thicker branches; in half an hour we had a roaring big fire. Gudaev hung a large iron pot over it and boiled water; Chekai settled down to pluck the quails; Achmet prepared to make bread. When the water had boiled Chekai informed me they would make copatchka. Achmet took maize flour, salt and milk and boiling water, and kneaded a dough into flat cakes about the size of soup plates. Gudaev stood them on end in front of the fire, and toasted them first one side and then the other. When they were done he buried them under the grey-red ashes and left them to cook. This done, he took from a wooden peg in the mud of the wall an iron violin with two strings, and commenced a tune of that sighing and moaning and shrieking style characteristic of Caucasian music. Chekai sang, and all the while plucked the little quails. When the birds had been quite disfeathered, singed and cleaned, the shepherd transfixed them together on a stake and toasted them at the fire. Achmet filled up the pot over the fire with milk, flour and salt, thereby preparing soup.
I had fallen back asleep when suddenly Chekai called out, “Stepan, get up and eat!” This I was not loth to do, and in a minute behold me tasting for the first time hot copatchka and roast quail. It must be said the bird was tasty though it was small. The milk soup made my teeth dance, it was so hot. Chekai began a conversation. “What are the English—Christians or Mahometans?” asked he. “Is England far away? Where does it lie?” I replied that it was four or five thousand versts to the north-west. Chekai whistled. “Beyond the mountains?” said he. “And have they such poor and dirty people there? Look how poor I am, look how I’m dressed.”
“I expect you’re not so poor as you look,” said I. “The owners of the sheep must pay you well, but you leave the money in the village with your wife and family, or your mother.”
The shepherd frowned and then grinned. I had apparently hit on the truth.
The time came to make an end of the feast and lie down to sleep. They gave me the best place between a fir plank and a sheep fence close to the hot embers. I covered myself entirely up in my travelling-bed, and was secure in that both from vermin and from dirt. The three others disposed themselves in different parts of the smoky cavern and began to snore horribly. I slept heavily.
At dawn, through custom, I awoke. Chekai was already stirring and had gathered fresh wood for the fire. He warned me it was necessary to hurry if he was to show me the track, for he had much work to do. I showed immediate alacrity. The weather seemed promising, and I was full of hope that I should reach the other side of the mountains in time for breakfast. We had a ten minutes’ parley over money. Chekai wasn’t quite sure that he couldn’t hold me up to ransom à la Hadgi Stavros. But he was eventually content to receive half-a-crown, together with the present of a pretty water-jar I had bought a week before in Georgia, and which he coveted. In exchange for the water-jar he presented me with his staff, which was stout and long and served me better in the long run than I could have guessed. I ought to have taken another meal of copatchka and milk before starting. A bottle of vodka in my pocket would not have been amiss. I did not dream that after two hours’ walking my heart would be beating so violently through exertion that I should fear to perish in the snow.
CHAPTER XXV
OVER MAMISON
I FOLLOWED my guide Chekai over the mountain marsh, where hundreds of bright yellow water-lilies were in blossom. The sun had just risen, the clouds were very white, and the clear sky was lambent greenish blue. “It’s going to be fine,” said the shepherd. “You’ll get across safely. In an hour you will come to the Southern Shelter, a white house; you can go in there and rest, and one of the soldiers will show you the way on. After the pass there is another house, but if it is stormy you won’t be able to see it for the snow. Never mind, you will hear the bell. There are two men on duty night and day, and they are obliged to ring the big bell whenever it is stormy. Perhaps they don’t ring it now in the winter, I don’t know; I’ve never been over before June when the road is black. Not more than four Ossetines have been over this month, but the soldiers go backwards and forwards seven or eight at a time.”
We came to the margin of the unmelted snow and followed a track for about a mile, and then my companion began to complain that his feet were getting frozen, and I told him that if I was now on the right track I could dispense with him; he might go back. This evidently he was glad to do. I paid him a rouble in small change, every coin of which he said was bad, and we had to test them separately on a bit of rock before he would be satisfied. We then exchanged presents, blessed one another and parted.
I was walking on a white carpet apparently boundless. To right and to left and ahead the rocks lifted themselves aloft in white masses. In the sky the clouds, torn as by storm winds, rushed hither and thither, now veiling the peaks and now the road, or filtering upward and downward at the neck of the pass. Here is the place where the weather is manufactured and shared out between north and south. The sky promised everything on the shipman’s card. The sun suddenly shone out and flashed over all the snow with blinding brilliance, and then almost as suddenly became overcast as a foaming wave of cloud was tossed over it. I began to fear that the mists might hinder my crossing, or keep me waiting for hours on the desert of snow, afraid to go forward.
The ascent became more arduous. The snow was softer, and the surface not frozen hard enough to bear me. At every third step I sank to the knee; the staff the shepherd had given me saved me once or twice, but I could never tell when I should be upborne by the snow and when I should sink. After half a mile of this I stopped and gasped. I thought I couldn’t get on. Storm, however, threatened. I must go on. I took another step and sank as deep as it is possible for one leg to go. In pulling myself out I fell on one shoulder and almost went out of sight. It was like the hindered progress in a nightmare. I must have rested ten minutes before I set forward again, and walked fifty yards by three steps and a fall irregularly along the faint track. I felt like Dorando at the finish of his race at Earl’s Court.
An hour’s struggle brought me to the Southern Shelter, a military station cold and uninviting, but even so a delight to my eyes, a very oasis in the wilderness. I saw no one there, and therefore did not stop. It seemed to me I must soon reach the summit. I was, however, destined to disappointment. The track now led up a steep bank, a weary way. I was constantly up to the waist in snow, and not a step that I took seemed to grip or take me appreciably forward. To add to the difficulties, the snow of last night’s storm had almost completely effaced the track; it was only with the greatest difficulty that the eye discerned and traced the way. One false step and I should have gone slithering over the snow into the abyss like a riderless sledge. The clouds above my head massed and the snow-flakes hurried down. I sat down on my travelling-bed and surveyed the grim, silent snowstorm; to me it was then a dreadful sight, and I began to ask myself if this would not perhaps turn out to be my last upon this bright world. A flash of lightning and the long roll of thunder quickened my fears. I started up again and battled forward. It was an almost heart-breaking business truly. Every ten yards I came to a standstill with heart palpitations, caused partly, perhaps, by the rarity of the atmosphere—I suppose at nine thousand feet the atmosphere is rarer—but caused in most part, without doubt, by my exertions; and my sunburnt hands had become violet in colour. All about me the storm raged and the mist hid the crest of the pass.
The thunder rolled once more, and then unexpectedly the sun shone through the snow-flakes. The veiled mountains looked like workmen disturbed while up to their eyes in some job. I looked along my way to the crest of the mountain. It seemed to lead right up into the sky. It would have been an ideal road for the poet Davidson. I whispered to myself his lines:
“Alone I climb
The rugged path that leads me out of Time.”
Then, after what seemed ages of slow dying, I saw in front of me the cross which marks the highest point of the pass. I did the impossible; I reached that cross. The reader may imagine the bliss I experienced sitting on my waterproof at its foot. Even if I perished in the descent I had now been a victor; henceforth there were no more Alps.
Downward was not so difficult. I even ran as if on skis till I realised the danger of breaking my legs. It was a delightful contrast, however, the slipping downhill, the falling, jumping, plunging downward. My heart was light.
I had not descended five hundred feet before I saw an extraordinary sight—a hanging, frozen avalanche waiting for the snow, a long, high wall of fixed but sliding snow frozen and glittering, myriadfold icicled, and not white but pale green. Seen from below the long pale-green wall looked ominous beyond words. A new danger now presented itself to my mind—that of being swept away by falling snow—and suddenly this was emphasised. I heard a long, low, sullen roar that could not be thunder, but which I could not locate. It was followed by a second which seemed an echo, and by a third. Then, looking to a peak, I saw the cause of one, a falling drift of snow. I saw the slow-moving white descending, descending, and then suddenly splashing over the cliff in brown mud. Fast after and before followed the stones. The danger from falling drifts was imminent, and I kept my eyes open. The storm cleared. The bell was not ringing at the bell-house, and I did not stay there. On my way down I met a man toiling upward, and I felt exceedingly overjoyed, and thought to talk with him, but he was pale as a ghost and utterly exhausted. Beyond greeting, and an inquiry as to the state of the road, I got no further word from him.
In half an hour I was out of the snow on to the black road, and presently I came to the first village on the north side. The inhabitants all gathered round me and stared, and asked where I had come from and congratulated me. One old man in particular shook hands with me, effusively calling me molodetse, “fine fellow,” and everyone seemed to combine to smile upon me. I was happy. One thing, however, was wanting—food. The village could only supply me with cold copatchka and salt.
CHAPTER XXVI
ARRESTED
I HAD been tramping almost three weeks when I crossed the snow of Mamison. I was therefore full of longing for the comforts of the town and calculated that in three days I should clear the remaining hundred miles and be resting in snug quarters. I was, in fact, full of such thoughts as I reached the village of Lisri, but, as Leonid Andrief says, “Man shall never know the next step for which he raises his tender foot.” At Lisri I was arrested.
The village is a straggling one, built out of grey stone and put together from the remains of ancient ruins. In the barrenest of pasture land, and having no more than three months’ summer, it is strange that anyone should have chosen to live there. Yet there is a large population of Ossetines. What they do beyond shooting bears and wild oxen by day and listening to the wolves at night it would be difficult to say. This day, however, there was unusual animation in the place. The priest had summoned all his parishioners and laid before them a proposal to build a new church and enlarge the school. It was a festive occasion, and probably more spirits were drunk that was conducive to my safety. In Ossetia there is little wine, but all the natives drink Araka, a home-brewed spirit suggesting gin in appearance but possessing the odour of stale whisky. It is made from fermented maize.
The man who arrested me was a primed villain. He reported me to the Ataman as a spy, and said I pretended to be ignorant of the Georgian language, but that he had trapped me into using some words of that tongue. He did not say he had offered to release me for ten shillings, and that he had proposed to discuss the bargain at a lonely point of the road two miles outside the village, and wished to accompany me thither. I had a very likely fear that he would have cut my throat and pushed me over the cliff into the snowy Ardon valley. He reminded me forcibly of some words a Russian had said to me: “The Ossetines have a tariff now—to lay a man out, one rouble; to murder him, three roubles.”
I argued, coaxed, threatened, bluffed, all without avail: my captor was merciless. I must say I mistrusted him dreadfully, and I would not have paid the bribe had I had the money ten times over. I went back to the village and he followed me. I tried to inveigle him into conversation with a group of villagers. I appealed to them and told my story in Russian; they favoured me, and told the fellow to let me go. With their moral support I attempted an escape, and I should have got clear away, but for the fact that at that moment a party of horsemen were coming down into the village and I was cut off by them. My captor was not angry; his only concern was to get me by myself. My care was to start a big dispute with each newcomer. At length I demanded to be taken to the Ataman, and in this I was successful. The man who arrested me wanted me to come home with him, but I outwitted him.
I was brought to the village schoolroom, where the priest was holding his meeting. Fifty men seemed to be all shouting at once. The business in hand was interesting; the clergyman had called them together to do work, provide material and offer money for the construction of the new buildings, and also to discuss the plans. A church in an Ossetine valley costs little; it is made of stone and pine without windows or seats; the whole village is idle and ready to build a house of God for themselves just as they would build a new cottage. The question of wages is not heard. Ruskin himself could not have wished for a more complete absence of the principles of the “dismal science.”
From the moment I entered I saw that the priest would be my friend. I was feeling desperately tired after climbing Mamison. I had used all my wits to get clear of the Ossetine, and now I fell back in exhaustion. I answered or failed to answer the questions of the inquisitive for hours. The Ataman came and questioned me lazily; in his heart he cursed his lieutenant for arresting me. He said to the people, in the Ossetine language, that if I escaped none was to hinder me. Several signalled to me to bolt, for everyone looked very kindly. But my captor hung on; there was no escaping him. He got me alone again, and tried to bully me with words into paying him the ten shillings. This was in the now empty schoolroom. I insisted on marching up and down, for it was cold, and for a quarter of an hour I listened to the man swearing at me.
Then the priest sent for me, and I was glad to get into better company. He was still surrounded by a crowd of villagers, but he saved me from my captor, taking me by a side door, and handing me over to his womenfolk to feed. I felt the brotherhood of educated men all over the world as he said to me sotto voce, “I am sorry to see you, a cultured man, in such a plight.” His wife was very kind to me and brought me minced mutton and scones and araka and tea. I felt myself in a quiet haven out of the storm.
My captor made two further attempts to gain possession of me, and even succeeded once, under pretext of taking me to the Ataman. But when I found I was being taken to his home I refused to move a step, and seeing the priest in the distance I shouted to him and ran towards him. The upshot of a long dispute was that the priest overruled the fellow and took me to his own house for the night. I returned, and Khariton, for such was his name, accompanied me. We had a new meal, and my host put off his priestly garments and made merry. He and his wife were a very young couple who were very fond of one another, and played practical jokes of an elementary order, such as pulling one another’s hair—the priest’s hair being almost as long as his wife’s.
Of the impressions of a very pleasant, convivial evening, what will chiefly remain in my memory is the discovery by Khariton of a small geography book, from which he read in a loud voice all that was said both in large print and in small about England. England had at last become for them an actually existent country. The good man had, however, seen an Englishman before. Some years ago one came up the valley prospecting for minerals. He could not speak a word of Russian, and he sat so funnily on his horse that all the natives laughed.
Did I know Professor Müller—professor of Asiatic languages at St Petersburg? He was a man to know. He came to Lisri some years back, and conversed with the natives in their own language so perfectly that they thought he must be an Ossetine.
Poor Khariton! he did not really know much of education. He confessed to me he was ready to die of shame when he had to speak with an educated Russian. But the Ossetines had few chances. It would be better later. They had schools and were learning. He was teaching the village what he knew, little though that were. They had, moreover, arranged for the improvements—on the morrow all that had been volunteered would be written down.
AN OSSETINE DWELLING
I asked him what would happen to me. He thought I should be released. Had he been in my place he should have died of fright, he said. But I might be easy in my mind. The Ataman had received a circular from the Governors, and he did not understand its meaning. He would probably send me to the next village, to the Ataman of Zaramag. The latter was an educated man and would see that a mistake had been made.
At ten o’clock Khariton and his wife spread a bed for me on the floor and I was glad to lie down. So, with slumber closing weary eyes, ended for me this distressing and adventurous day.
CHAPTER XXVII
FIVE DAYS UNDER ARREST
NEXT morning I was sent under escort to the village of Zaramag, ten miles distant. But before starting Priest Khariton said to me, “I see that you have some of our copatchka in your satchel; permit me to give it to our dog, my wife will give you something fit to eat.” And the kind woman filled my bag with scones and cake and eggs.
I was sent in charge of a very old man to the Ataman of Zaramag. I might easily have escaped, but it seemed more interesting to remain a prisoner. Outside Lisri he showed me a pool of human blood on the road where there had been a fight the night before. They are evidently rather rough in this district. I felt rather safer as a prisoner than if I had been at liberty.
We passed several small villages, one of which was Tli, an accumulation of broken-down towers; twelfth-century ruins patched together for the housing of the people of to-day. We were stopped here; someone called to us from the cliff. “There is a man dead,” said my escort. “We must go up here.” We climbed up accordingly, and found all the men of the village collected together, sitting on pine logs. Two men came rapidly forward to greet us, and we stood as it were on a threshold, while these proclaimed something in a loud voice in the Ossetine language. I think it meant, “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen,” or the equivalent of that. We took off our hats and crossed ourselves, I following the example of my companion. With that someone took our things from us and put them aside, and we entered into the assembly and took seats on the logs. Everyone had goats’ horns, from which they were drinking, and a vessel of that kind was brought to me full of araka, and with it hard-baked millet cake and salt. Everyone seemed to be serious, and to judge by the activity of three men going to and fro with copper kettles replenishing the horns, all were drinking hard. He who had died had been a very poor old man, but if he had been twice as poor and twice as miserable in his life I am sure his death would have none the less proved an excuse for the glass.
The Ataman of Zaramag was present, and my guard gave him the letter, in which he was asked if he knew anything against me, or who I was. He said the letter was unintelligible to him, and that I should have to be sent back, but all the same he sent me on to Zaramag to wait for him.
I waited there all day with a drunken Russian clerk who wanted to borrow money to buy a quart of araka in order to drink my health. His wife, however, to save him the disgrace, now produced a bottle which she had previously hidden from him, and he proceeded once more to add water to the ocean.
It was yet early in the morning, but I spent the rest of the day with the man and his wife, drinking tea and listening to the confused boastings and witticisms of the drunkard. The Ataman remained at the burial-feast.
In the afternoon I grew tired of waiting and said I would walk on to the next village, and that if the Ataman wanted me he could send for me, and I strolled out accordingly. The clerk seemed paralysed by faith, and just sat and stared in amazement. I walked out of the village and took the road. There, however, I met the Ataman, who smiled amiably and re-conducted me to the abode of the clerk.
I spent that night in an almost sumptuous apartment in the house of the Ataman. First he entertained me at dinner, and we ate mutton and drank sweet Ossetinsky beer from a wooden loving-cup. Obviously being arrested has its advantages.
The next day I was sent to the Ataman of Nuzal, asking what he had to say about me. For some time I had thought I should have been returned to Lisri, but the drunken clerk had intervened and advised that I be sent further. The boy who should have taken me went without me, however, and I was put into the charge of a carter going that way.
The road now led downhill, and I left the snow behind. The valley of Zaramag, which might be called a nursery of rivers, has a wild beauty, though it came harshly upon my eyes after the soft luxuriance of the South. We followed the river Ardon through the wonderful gorge of Kassar. The little thread of road runs unobtrusively through ten miles of ruined cliffs. Far below the little river agonises, roars and conquers. The height, the depth, the gloom, the chaos of decay and ruin—these appal the vision. It is more dreadful and uninhabitable than the gorge of Dariel, a dangerous district, moreover, where man needs fear the bear and the wolf. Above a glacier my guide pointed out to me specks which he said were bison.
We arrived at Nuzal in the afternoon and there a comedy enacted itself. The Ataman refused to receive me or to have anything to do with me, declaring he had no authority to arrest me. “What shall I do?” asked the carter. “That’s nothing to do with me,” answered the Ataman. “Do you hear?” said the carter to me. “The Ataman won’t take you; go and beg him to take you, or else you’ll have to go back to Lisri.”
“I shan’t go a single step back upon the road,” said I.
“You will be forced,” said he.
“Then I shall be forced,” I replied. “They’ll have to carry me.”
“But what shall I do?” asked the carter. “I’m going to Ardon on business. I can’t take you back.”
No one would have anything to do with the poor man. A Russian visiting doctor came up and talked to me, and when he heard of the dilemma he was like to die of laughter. The idea that the Ataman of a remote village should have arrested a European tourist tickled him immensely. He promised to write my story in the Russian newspapers. “Let him go,” said he; “and as for that,” pointing to the letter, “throw it away.”
“I must have a receipt,” said the carter.
“I’ll give you one,” said I.
The upshot was, however, that I agreed to go a stage further, to Misure, where there is a silver factory and a telephone to Vladikavkaz. It was a Belgian factory, and M. Devet was a very nice man. I agreed to that, but at Misure the telephone was out of order, and beyond drinking a bottle of wine between us we gained no comfort there. I counted myself free really, for certainly the carter was without authority, but it was interesting to see what would happen next, and I forebore to escape. The man cursed his stars for having taken me, but he was obsessed by a sense of duty. He would take me on to Alagir and hand me over to the Pristav there. To Alagir we went accordingly. En route, however, we slept in a little shop by the wayside, and it was not till next morning that we passed through the gorge of Ardon with its hot sulphur springs, and came to the large settlement on the steppes known as Alagir.
At the Pristav’s office we had to wait five hours, and I was assured I should be liberated, but then I found they dared not release me. I had to go to Ardon, fifteen miles distant.
As I was leaving Alagir there was a strange incident. A well-dressed man, whom I mistook for a member of the Russian Secret Police, came up to me, and tried to get me to say things against the Russian Government and my treatment. “You can speak to me as to a mate,” said he. “I also am a politikan. What happened to you? You are exhausted. Never mind. Bear up.” He spoke a few words aside to my guard, and then went on again. “I have arranged,” said he. “You won’t go just yet. You must come along with me and have a meal, then I will take both of you in a cart, and we can have a chat.” I felt suspicious and refused.
Meanwhile two young men came up and entered into conversation with him, and they asked me my story. I told them, and one said, “We represent the Society for the help of educated Ossetines in distress; we beg you to receive our help.” Then one gave me five separate ten-copeck pieces and a slip of paper with his address, saying, “If you are in difficulty write to me. You will need money before you are released—to this little you are welcome.”
Again I refused and thanked them profusely. Then the first man said he must have offended me. I insisted that he hadn’t, and we parted. I have every reason to believe that they were very honest and good people, though their manner was not very assuring. My guard, who had patiently waited, now went on and I followed.
From Ardon I was sent to a place called Ard-Garon, where I spent the night at the house of a hospitable Ossetine. I arrived in the evening, and my host took me out for a walk on the steppes to what he called a “mayovka,” so called because it was held in the month of May. It was an evening picnic of about fifty Ossetine men. There were no women. They had buckets of araka and baskets of mutton and bread. I politely partook of their viands.
From Ard-Garon I was exported to Gizel, where my good fortune seemed to suffer eclipse. I was thrust, in spite of my protests, into the village gaol, there to exist from three in the afternoon till eight next morning. I had had nothing to eat all day and nothing was obtainable here. Only, in answer to my complaint, the gaoler put in a pail of dirty water that I might drink if I wanted to.
At Ardon an official had said to me, “We can’t keep you here because we’ve nowhere to put you. You wouldn’t like to lie in prison, would you? Have they prisons in England?... Clean ones, I suppose. But ours are dirty. Would you like to see ours?” He burst into a guffaw of laughter. But the Ataman said to him, “No, no, you needn’t go out of your way to do that.”
I suppose the place was ugly. I did not guess that on the succeeding night I should be for the first time in a Russian gaol.
It was a verminous cell, with holes in the rotten flooring and no glass in the barred windows. The door was cased in iron; the walls hung in tatters of broken plaster. There were no seats, but at one end some planks served for a bed. My companions were an Ossetine and an Ingoosh, both charged with stealing, and a madman, who was, I understood, a regular tenant of the den. I had obviously nothing to do with these people and didn’t belong to their class. They were as selfish as possible, and I suppose I should have had a bad night but for the fact that I was so worn out. I huddled myself together on the planks and slept. At Vladikavkaz next day, the Chief of Police inspected my passport, and bade me take my liberty and “live with God.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
MR ADAM
TRAMPS often bring blessings to men. They are very brotherly; they have given up the causes of quarrels. Perhaps sometimes they are a little divine. God’s grace comes down upon them.
Certainly one day I met a noble tramp, an Eden tramp. He came upon me at dawn with a wood smile on his old face. He was one of the society of tramps; he knew all Russia, its places and peoples, and he called himself Mr Adam. Why did he adopt that name—why had he thrown away the other name? These were questions he was not in a hurry to answer. They involved a story. Such a story! It sounded in my ears like a secret melody of the world. But first let me say how I met this most jovial wayfarer.
I had slept one night by the side of the road among nettles and thistles. My pillow was a stone, my bed soft, dusty earth. I was so near to the road that the lumbersome, creaking ox-carts, that approached and passed in the night, seemed within arm’s reach—so near that I felt the movement in the air as they passed. Horses snorted uneasily now and then, and once in the early morning a dog came snuffing among the herbage after me. It was a night of dew and dust. I do not suppose I slept more than three hours, but it did not seem a long night. The approach of dawn came as a surprise to me. I was glad to think it was dawn even if it should turn out to be an illusion. My bed was too cold and fresh, my eyes seemed clammy and sticky, as if spun together with gossamer threads, my forehead was heavy as iron, my body seemed long and ponderous as that of a trold. Everything in me waited for the sun. A night on the mountains gives its peculiar refreshment; it nurses each limb in cold, dewy air, and transmits its influence in cold thrills into the very depths of one.
I sat up and surveyed the scene in the half light, and what was my surprise to see an apparently monstrous figure of a man coming toward me along the road. I almost feared him, but I soon saw his peculiar smile of geniality and my fears gave way. This was Mr Adam. He came up to me as if he had known me from the cradle. The usual greeting and question passed, and then he pulled out of his ragged overcoat a chunk of bread and some hard white cheese, and sat down on a stone with the evident intention of breakfasting. I bade him wait whilst I filled my kettle. Whilst I went to get water he lit a fire. We had a very cheery meal. He cut his bread and cheese with a rusty dagger!
He told me how he came to take the name of Adam, in memory of an old companion of the road who made a poor woman in Vladikavkaz very happy. This is the story. There was a man named Peter who died, leaving a widow and three children. The woman was very young and had a baby at her breast and was without money. When she had paid for priest and coffin there was little left her. Her husband had been a writer in a railway office; he wrote envelopes and copied letters. He only received forty roubles a month and was very improvident. Though perhaps it was not he, but Society, that was improvident; for his wife was a good woman and her children worthy. And when one is young one does not expect to die.
Anna, for such was her name, had to leave the house where Peter had died. She had to step down in the world. She took one room in a little cottage, and lived there, and waited to starve. Neighbours helped her, but they were very poor, and her babes, like young birds in the nest, all stretched out their mouths to her and cried.
It was a bare room. The family slept upon the floor. There was an old table that had been lent to them, and a stool and a box. In a corner the Ikon picture gleamed. The woman was little clothed, and the children showed their little white bodies. So much had been sold to get a little money for food that even the samovar was not seen. Neighbours coming in held up their hands in pity of their poverty.
But their fortune changed a little, for one day a strange chance befell. Anna had made a fire between some stones in the yard of the cottage, and was cooking a mixture in a pot when a ragged old man came up and begged a taste of the soup. She looked at him and thought how strange it was that anyone should beg of her, and then she refused him, saying, “I am as poor as you, good man, and my soup is bad, for it is what I have myself gathered. I took my pot to the market and begged. It is the first time, and it feels very strange. Everyone knew I did not beg for money, only for food. Some put in fruit, and some poured in milk; others threw in biscuits; near the butchers’ line I got a piece of meat, and by the vegetable stalls I picked up some cabbage leaves and an old cucumber. It is very well. I shall go every morning and we shall not starve. Only the soup is for us and it will not be good for others.”
The old man was tall and very hairy; one could scarcely see his face for hair, and through the rents of his ragged red shirt one saw his brown hairy chest. His overcoat was of many colours and many cloths; he had evidently sewn into it whatever cloth he had picked up during many wanderings, and he had lain in it in many muds and soils, and the stains remained. His legs were tied up in sacking like trees protected from the winter, and his boots, which he had made himself without leather, were little bags of wool and shavings and grasses and dandelion down. He was not, however, the least self-ashamed.
He did not reply to Anna’s refusal for some minutes, but he stood watching, fumbling among his rags, and she wished he would go away. But going away was not part of his intention. He slowly brought out a large iron spoon and, to the vexation of the woman, knelt down on the ground and peered into the pot. Then he gave his reply.
“When Christ is near, water becomes wine;” and with that he skimmed the simmering liquid and lifted a spoonful to his mouth.
“It’s tasty,” said he; “awfully tasty—really amazingly tasty.”
Anna smiled and answered simply, “I’m glad you like it, grandfather.” Grandfather took another spoonful and smacked his lips. “You know,” said he, “this is something quite out of the way; it is very original; I knew it was very good soup, it was speaking so well. I heard its voice far away. It called to me, it sang. What do you say to it, my dear, if I dine with you to-night?”
Anna looked up at him appealingly. “No,” said she, “pass by. We are very poor, and this is all we have to eat; it is too poor for any guest. Dear old man, go away.”
“Oh, no! I don’t think so. This sort of soup a king would be glad to eat. It is the sort kings can’t get. You might even make a great fortune if you sent a sealed tin of this to the Tsar. The Tsar’s cook is a great friend of mine; if you could get on the right side of him you’d never want for a piece of meat to throw in the soup. But I advise you, don’t part with the recipe, it’s worth its weight in gold. And now, what do you say to having me as a boarder? Yes, surely as God rules over everything why shouldn’t I stay here? How much shall I pay? Well, never mind, you make this soup each day and then you can save all the money.”
Anna now felt seriously troubled. An old ragged man could be no help to her; he could not pay her anything, and she would be poorer than before. She pinched up her pretty lips into a bunch, and frowned and shook her head violently; it would never do. “No, grandfather, I couldn’t take you; we are very poor, and you are even poorer than we are.”
Thereupon the old man laughed exuberantly, and his eyes shone like those of Santa Claus.
“I know, I know, I know,” said he.
“What do you know, grandfather?”
The old man laughed again, and then pulled out a large volume, old and rusty-leaved. It was a Bible, and he opened it between the Old Testament and the New, and there were money notes for seven hundred roubles.
“That’s what,” said he. “My wages for clearing the clouds out of the sky for the Sultan of Turkey—for you twelve roubles a month, and you needn’t spend a penny of it, for we shall live on such soup as this.”
Anna meekly bade him welcome, wondering who he might be in disguise. Some great man, surely, she thought, for he seemed very highly connected.
“What is your name, grandfather?” said she, as he stumped into her room and sat down on the box, and took little Foma on one knee and Mania on the other.
“What is my name?” said he. “Ho, ho, ho,” and he laughed. “That’s a good joke. It is a long, long while since anyone asked me my name. I’ve heard so many names; they were so like mine that I got confused long ago, and it wasn’t worth while remembering. What do you think, little Fomitchka? And you’ll be asking where I come from. Really, I don’t know. How many provinces are there in Russia? Thousands surely. One day I slipped out of my own province and lost myself, and I kept coming to new provinces, always new names, and the places just looked the same. You know it says in the Bible Adam was the first man; Mr Adam, then came Mr Cain Adam and Mr Abel Adam, and Mr Seth Adam. You call me Mr Adam.”
“A-dam, grandpa,” said little Foma.
So the ragged old man with the money and the Bible and the spoon came and lived with them. They all lived together, slept in the same room, and ate from the same table. Every morning Anna went to the market with her pot and collected food, and every evening she boiled soup on the stones, whilst grandfather dipped his finger or his spoon into the stew and tasted it approvingly. Every Sunday she received three roubles from him and put them by. It was strange; they lived as poorly now as they had done before. So poorly they lived that they only had tea once a week, and they boiled it in a saucepan and had it without sugar. Grandfather had produced a partly-used two-ounce packet of tea from his overcoat. Yet this tea-party was something glorious—a strange weekly happiness to be anticipated even six days ahead. Anna ceased to feel anxious, and the children grew rounder and happier, though it was difficult to see how it had come to be. They were being fed by something more than soup; perhaps, as they scrambled about grandfather’s knees and listened to his stories, they were enchanted a little. Anna looked at them and wondered. Grandfather has tramped through sun and rain, thought she—how dark and rich his hands are, like the black earth in the spring. Her little baby, that had done nothing but scream and look unhappy since it was born, had now begun to smile. It smiled at grandfather like a little evening gleam of sunshine after wet, wet days.
“Lizetchka,” her mother would exclaim. “Ah, Lizetchka! Little Lizetchka! My little angel!” Then the neighbours came in and they would have found fault and gossiped, but grandfather’s cheery way took their hearts by surprise. And the owner of the cottage, who was responsible, wanted to turn the old man out because he had no passport, and it was dangerous to harbour such a man; but he, too, was won over; though he was mean, and had a wife meaner than himself, he contentedly took the risk. Sometimes his wife would urge him on against Anna and the old man, and he would go to them to say stern words; but when he came and saw the children, with their little fingers tangled in grandfather’s hair, he would forget his message and laugh and say, “Ah, Mr Adam! Fancy you living here without a passport! It’s all right living so, eh?”
So time went on, and no one disturbed the little ménage of Anna and her three children and Mr Adam. Years passed, and the old man ceased to be a surprise; nothing new happened; no one inquired after him; no one claimed him. He lived all the while in his rags, and read from his Bible, and played with the children, and praised the soup, and made merry with the neighbours. Only once Anna had been sad. That was when she mended his torn red shirt for him. She had often mended Peter’s clothes whilst he wore them on his body, and now an irresistible memory brought back the pathos of her loss. She wept a little and Adam comforted her, and as she looked through her tears at him she felt suddenly very grateful, and it seemed to her that perhaps Peter had sent this man to her to help her. Suddenly the thanks which had been mounting up in her heart overflowed, and as she finished sewing she put her arms round his neck and kissed him.
The days of these years were strange days, the strangest of Anna’s life, and in after years they seemed only a few days, only a short, strange period of heavenly comfort. For the time came when she had Adam no more. He fell ill and died.
“Mr Adam’s dead,” said all the neighbours, and they felt very sad. “Mr Adam is dead,” said the owner’s wife. “Now you’ll see how foolish it is to have a man without a passport. What will the police say? You’ll have to put his dead body in a field for men to find, and then it will be said we murdered him.”
“Grandpa dead,” said all the children and moped.
But Anna felt very troubled. What was she to do with him, a man without a name, without a family, without a village? A man who had over five hundred roubles in his Bible! Poor Anna! Had she but had a little cunning she might have put by those five hundred roubles to be a little fortune for herself. Grandfather had died very suddenly or he would have told her to do so. Anna was simple enough to go and tell the police her story, and an official came, looked at the man, and took away the Bible, saying he would have it examined. In the Bible lay the precious notes! Then Anna bought white robes and took off Adam’s rags, and washed his body, and laid him upon some clean boards, and bought a cheap coffin, and hired a man to dig a grave, and she went and buried him, and put a little Ikon on his breast, and held a lighted candle over his tomb, and sang the thrice-holy hymn, “Holy, holy, holy,” and went home. Adam was no more; they were poor; the official never returned with the Bible; no one asked about the missing passport. But what the greedy official had not guessed, and what Adam had never divulged, was that in his rags, in one of his many deep pockets, was secreted another sum of money, a thousand roubles. This Anna found, and was wiser than before, having learnt from experience. To-day she keeps a little cookshop and is prosperous, and the peasants say that she, better than any of the wives of the village, knows how to make good soup.
Such was the story the tramp told me. He liked telling it, and now, as I have repeated it, I find the same personality in the friend of the woman and in my acquaintance. Surely Adam did not really die. Adam never really dies.
One other thing he said to me that remains; there are two Adams—the Adam before he tasted the fruit and the Adam after he had tasted. Most Russians retain their Eden happiness, but whenever one of them tastes of the Tree of Knowledge his old happiness is cursed; the time has come for him to leave Eden and seek the new happiness. Adam was the first modern man. The tramps have found the second Eden.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE BAPTIST CHAPEL
I HAVE continually come across Protestants in Russia. They are undoubtedly increasing in numbers very rapidly. Several times when I was out in the mountains I came across proselytising Baptists and Molokans. The Molokan is a sect of Protestant exclusively Russian, I think. They differ from orthodox peasants by their ethics. They hold it a sin to smoke or to drink, and they do not recognise the Ikons. Even in Lisitchansk there had been a Baptist family, and in Moscow I had found Lutherans.
M. Stolypin’s ukase marked the decease of Pan-Slavism, that policy summarised in the words—one Tsar, one Tongue, one Church. It was comparatively little noticed, this Emancipation Bill of Russia, but it will probably prove a more important concession to the forces of Democracy than any other fruit of the Revolutionary struggle. It began a new era: historians in the future will take it as a starting-point in the history of Russian freedom. Meanwhile, despite rumours to the contrary, Russia as a whole is as peaceful as Bedfordshire. The Revolutionary storm has passed away; the new issues of life and death germinate in silence. The flushed red fruit burst out, the seeds were scattered. To-day the seeds gather strength and grow and put forth shoots, and even the ordinary observer is aware of the beginning of a crop whose nature is sufficiently enigmatical. On another day there will be another harvest. And if Elizabethan Puritans meant ultimately the Whitehall gallows, one may ask apprehensively for the significance of the Puritanism that is springing into existence in the reign of Nicholas II.
I was talking to the pastor one evening shortly after I came.
“We increase, brother,” said he to me, “we increase. Three years ago there were only 120 of us and now we are 300; in three more years we shall be half a thousand, not less.”
“But is it not dangerous?” I said. “Surely you come into conflict with the authorities.”
“Not much now. Three of us were hanged two years ago. And often meetings are forbidden. The last Governor forbade our meetings altogether; that was ten years ago. Many of us suffered through that; some are in prison now and some died in prison. But we held our meetings despite the ukase of the Governor. We used to gather together at a friend’s house, and then after tea we would have our few hymns and a prayer or two. These meetings were generally very happy, the common bond of danger made us closer than brothers.”
“And you?” I asked. “Were you ever arrested?”
“Yes, with four others one night; two of them died in prison, they were old men and it was hard on them. I served five years’ penal servitude. That was for holding a meeting against the order.”
The minister was silent as if recalling old memories, and then suddenly he went on as if brushing aside his thoughts. “But things are quieter now. In all Russia there are twenty thousand Baptists alone, besides many thousand other Protestants, and we are added to in numbers every year. In Rostof a little congregation has become three thousand since the Duma came in. And now dotted all over the country we have little missions among the peasants; it’s the peasants who’re coming to us, and nobody else has been able to teach them. Every year new missions start. Next month I make my little country tour, when the harvesters are in the fields, and I go to five new places—five places to which the Gospel has come this year.”
On the very first Sunday morning comes my host to warn me not to be late for service. I prepared to go to chapel seriously; it was long since I had been in any place of worship other than a temple of the Orthodox Church.
Half a mile distant I found the building, the little defiant, heterodox place so brave in its denial and protest. Here was no church, not even a chapel, just a plain wooden building. This black, gaunt building, less beautiful and less ornamented than a house. God dwells in those jewelled, perfumed caskets of the Orthodox Church; He dwells here also. How well and how daringly the paradox had been asserted! And they called it a meeting, not a service, and it was held upstairs and not down; and instead of standing all through one sat all through, and there were no crosses and no ornaments and no collections, and the women sat on one side while the men sat on the other.
The room was large. Wooden forms ranged on each side, there was a narrow passage down the middle, and at the head of it stood the preacher’s platform, slightly elevated from the people. The whole looked somewhat like a chapel schoolroom.
The congregation was in its way quite a grand one. Not that it was by any means numerous; the little place was full, one couldn’t say more than that. But there wasn’t a woman dressed in anything finer than printed cotton, and the minister was the only man who wore a collar. Something in the people called out one’s reverence. Each woman had a cotton shawl for head-dress, and as the women’s side filled one looked along a vista of shawled heads, and when now and then one of them turned to look at a stranger one saw the broad-browed, pale face of a peasant woman.
They were all peasant folk, or working men or artisans, and very simple and earnest. One knew much of them when one heard the words of their elected pastor. Ivan Savelev, when he came in, walked directly to his place and knelt, and then after a few minutes’ silence closed his prayer by a few words spoken on behalf of the congregation—gentle, simple words, such as a mother might put into the mouth of her child. He is a tall, douce man, the minister, of a Scottish type of countenance. His calm face and eyes suggest an infinite reserve of wisdom, and his gentle, musical voice tells of a mind and will in harmony. Presently he read from the Bible, and then gave out a hymn, and afterwards spoke from a text, first to the women, then to the men, and then to both collectively, and then gave out another hymn. What struck me was that he did each thing as if it were worth while, so that the numbers of the hymns sounded beautifully.
The people sang with a will and kept in tune. The pastor, after giving out the number, stepped over to the harmonium and played a tune. He is choir-master as well as preacher, and teaches his people new tunes from two books of his own—Hymns, Ancient and Modern, and an old copy of Moody and Sankey; priceless treasures, one would say, though the printed English words remain inscrutable. We went off to the tune of “See the conquering hero comes,” the Russian words seeming very irrelevant. When the tune was in full swing one really felt oneself back in England—old memories crowded to my mind. Just before the sermon there was another hymn, and this to the tune of “Oh, God, our help in ages past;” but a presto motif, and a quaint alteration in the phrasing of the tune, reminded one of peals of church bells. They sang it as if the lines ran:
“Oh, God, our help in ages past our
Hope for years to come.
Our Shelter from the stormy blast and
Our Eternal home.”
The pastor’s sermon was direct; to him the issue was clear. Not alone those who say “Gospody, Gospody,” but those who do the will of my Father shall enter into the Kingdom. He counselled them to lead earnest, sober lives, and to bring up their families in the truth. Everyone listened in resolute stillness. One felt their God in the midst of them—the God of the Puritans.
I found my thoughts straying back to England, and I wondered if I saw before me a picture of what the early Independents or early Methodists were like. I was accustomed to chapels in London where each person belongs to our advanced civilisation, and where the preacher hands more than the simple bread of life. Here each man was of the crude, rough material out of which civilisations are made. Here was a passion for simplicity; everything was elemental, original. There were strange, new silences to be divined below the voices and the sounds, strange barenesses and nakednesses underneath the scanty nature of the service. For a moment one shut one’s eyes to the room, and opened other eyes to another scene—to the stable and the manger and the straw. Yes, here were the beginnings of things.
After service I walked home with the pastor. “You will become a political force,” I said. “Who knows?” he replied. “I hope not, but we increase in numbers. Everyone added to us is one added to the forces of truth and purity.”
Some pilgrims passed us. “There they go,” he said, “hundred of miles to pray to God in an ancient monastery. God is there, He is not here, so they say. They go to pray, and they waste their money and their time, and it all ends in vodka drinking. God grant they may become less and less.”
The pilgrims retreated, staff in hand, hooded and with great bundles on their backs. Slowly, as it were, reluctantly, they moved away, and to me they seemed the living figure of the past, and this fresh, strong man beside me was the new.
“You are laying the foundation of a Russian democracy,” I went on. “In England or America you would see a democracy three hundred years ahead of this. Have you heard of the London slums, or of Chicago? Are you not afraid of the responsibility?”
He smiled. “Three hundred years is a long time, brother. We teach the truth. If your people have gone wrong it was because they turned away, they took wrong turnings. It is God’s will that we preach and spread the truth.”
Ivan Savelev carried himself with the air of one who had uttered an unquestionable truism. His truths were his own, and for him indisputable. I left him and went to meditate on the secret life I had discovered.
It moves silently and unseen, like running water under snow, and on countless hillsides and valleys and plains the spring movement has begun. One day Russia will awake and find the season new. Then there will come another autumn and another harvest, and the good seed will be found to have multiplied thirtyfold, sixtyfold, and some an hundredfold.
DEVDORAK GLACIER, GORGE OF DARIEL
CHAPTER XXX
THE WOMAN WHO SAW GOD
ONE day, when I was visiting a village on the steppes, I came upon a strange comedy very typical of Russian life. I went in to a bootmaker to get one of my boots sewn up, and I overheard the following conversation.
“Marya Petrovna has seen the Anti-Christ,” says the cobbler’s wife.
“No,” says Jeremy, her husband, “it is God who has looked on her. God has been very pleased with Masha.”
“Yes,” rejoins his wife, “she seems very holy, but I don’t like it. Last Sunday at church she knelt so long that everyone thought she had fallen asleep. When the priest opened the door of the church she went in and knelt down on the stones before the blessed Ikon. All through the service she kneeled, and all through the Communion, and though she had bought her loaf and the priest called her she did not go up to the altar, but simply went on kneeling. Then, when the bells rang and we all went out, she still remained kneeling. And she didn’t cross herself. The priest himself had to come and lift her out of the church so that he could lock up. I think she’s under a curse. She has done some dreadful sin—has talked with wood spirits, perhaps.”
“The Squire’s son came on the Devil’s hoof marks in the forest last week, and saw a man with eight dead foxes shortly afterwards.”
The cobbler’s wife held up her hands with horror.
Katusha, a young woman from a neighbouring izba, has come in.
“You speak of Marya Petrovna,” says she. “We saw her last night, Tanya, Lida and I and a lot of us looking through the window. She was kneeling on her knees and praying to the samovar and calling it God. The priest went in and tried to talk with her, and he tried to raise her, but it was difficult, so he picked up the samovar instead and hid it away. Then poor Masha stood up, and we saw her look at the big black pot that has the cabbage soup in it, and she crossed herself as if it were an Ikon. Two days, they say, she hasn’t eaten, and Peter, her husband, has had to get his meals himself. She won’t do anything in the house, and directly she sees something new she goes down on her knees to it. The priest has been reasoning with her, and she says she sees God everywhere. God is everywhere, that is true, but Masha says He’s in the pots and pans and in the stove, and she won’t sit on a chair because she says it’s all God. You should have seen her last night, she looked a holy saint, and her eyes were full of light.”
“Lord save us!” exclaimed the cobbler’s wife.
“Permit me to go on. Her eyes were full of light, and she lifted up her hands to the roof, and sang strange music, so that we all felt terrified, and the priest wept. When we saw the priest weeping we didn’t know what to think, and presently he and Peter came and told us to go home, and that Marya Petrovna had had a vision—God had been so good to her.”
The cobbler looked very solemnly at her for some minutes, and then turned his gaze upon his wife. “I think,” said he, “that it may be that this is the second coming of Christ.”
“Idiot!” exclaimed his wife. “How could Masha be Christ?”
“I don’t mean Masha,” he replied, “but perhaps she sees Him coming. He may be getting nearer and nearer every moment, and Masha may see the glory brighter and brighter. Masha always was our most religious.”
At this point the grocer’s wife, in a red petticoat and a jacket and a shawl, rushed in, and exclaimed:
“Just think, friends, Marya Petrovna is dead! I am absolutely the first person to give the news, I had it from the priest just as he left the house. He watched with her all night—but pardon me, I must be going.”
With that she rushed out to be the first to give the news to the rest of the village.
The cobbler and his wife exclaimed together, “Bozhe moï! Oh, Lord!” And Katusha slipped out after the grocer’s wife, intending evidently to have her share in the glory of gossip. The cobbler threw aside his last, and went out as he was, in his apron and without his hat, and his wife went with him. They swelled the little crowd that was already collected outside Masha’s dwelling.
It was indeed as the grocer’s wife had indicated. Marya Petrovna had died. Of what she had died everyone could say something. Some peasants ascribed it to the Devil and some to God. The majority held that God had taken her to heaven. The priest’s explanation was that the woman’s life had been very acceptable to God, and that He had blessed her with a vision of His glory. The vision had been a promise; it had perhaps shown her her glorious place in heaven. The vision of God had entered her eyes, so that she could not put it aside and look at the ordinary things of life. She could not see a samovar—she saw God. She couldn’t make tea with the samovar; that would have been sacrilege. She could not eat soup, she couldn’t sit down, she couldn’t lie down, she couldn’t touch anything. To do these things was sacrilege. So she died. She died from utter exhaustion and from starvation. No doubt God had taken this means to bring her from the world.
Such was the story that the priest communicated to his superiors and to St Petersburg, hoping that it might perhaps be thought fit to honour the mortal memory of this new Mary whom the Lord had honoured. No canonisation, however, followed, though to the inhabitants of the village of Celo the woman remains a saint and a wonder, and the moujiks cross themselves as they pass the cottage where she used to live.
CHAPTER XXXI
ALI PASHA
THE Persian nation, which numbers seven or eight millions of dwellers on its own soil, has many thousands scattered over the rich valleys of the Caucasus. In Tiflis, in Baku, Batum, Kutais, the Persian, clad in vermilion or crimson or slate-blue, is a familiar figure in the streets. Their wares, their inlaid guns and swords and belts, their rugs and cloaks, are the glory of all the bazaars of Trans-Caucasia. One’s eye rests with pleasure on their leisurely movements, their gentle forms and open, courteous gait; and they give an atmosphere of peace and serenity to streets where otherwise the knives of hillmen, and the sullen accoutrements of Cossacks, would continually impress one with the notion of impending storm.
Ali Pasha, or, as his friends familiarly call him, Ali Khan, is one of this gentle, harassed nation, a native of Ararat, having been brought up within the shadow of that awful mountain upon which, it is said, the Ark first grounded.
I had my first talk with him one evening shortly after I came to the mill. It was a Saturday night, and the pastor’s family were preparing for the Sabbath by holding a prayer-meeting round the samovar. The other neighbours were skulking round the window listening to the hymn-singing, so we were left to ourselves.
It was in the shade of evening. He was having his tea at his ease—crimson tea, coloured by infusion of cranberry syrup. I was sitting near by, writing a letter to England. He looked over with some interest, and presently came and stood over me, regarding my fountain pen and English calligraphy with a mild curiosity. I gave him the pen to examine, he handled it carefully, and, having eyed it over with naïve amazement, returned it in silence. He volunteered to show me Persian writing, and presently brought forth from his dwelling two volumes of prayers written in what was evidently Persian copper-plate, and by his own hand. Each word, though symmetrical in itself, looked like a pen-and-ink sketch of a wood on fire in a wind. Yet it was very beautiful and reminiscent of nothing so much as of an old Bible copied before the days of printing.
Ali Khan had purple beard and hair—his head looks as if it had been soaked in black-currant juice. His face is smoky, his eyes grey, benignant. He wears a slate-blue cloak, golden stockings, and loose slippers; he is slender, and stands some five feet ten above the ground. His finger nails and the palms of his hands are carmined.
He had never met an Englishman before, and eyed me somewhat incredulously when I said I came from London. “The English are a wonderful people,” he remarked. “Their ships call at all the ports of the world, the armies of the great Queen are more countless than the stars of heaven.” I explained that the Queen was dead, and that we had a King now, but the Persian’s interests seemed to be little in foreign affairs, and he was all eager to tell me of his prayers and fasts. No, he was not a Babi, but a pure Mahommedan. There were sects of Mahommedans, just as many as there were Christian sects. His church was up on the hill, the one with the crescent moons on the spires. Soon a big fast would commence, and he must eat no food during seventeen hours each day.
I ventured to pronounce the words “Omar Khayyám.” He smiled, but did not seem surprised that I had heard of him. “Our Omar.” Yes, he read Omar. “And do your people read Omar much?” I asked. “It is in vain,” he replied; “my people are very wretched, few can read, and few care to. It is noble to be on horseback fighting with the Russians, or against the Russians. No; boys used to go to school, but now they run wild, for there is such disorder.”
A sort of sweet melancholy came over his face, and I asked him how he came to be an exile from his country. “It is not a bad country to be exiled from,” he began. “It would have been in vain if I had remained there. Ali Mamedof wrote to me to come here, that there were many of my countrymen here, and there were plenty who wanted coats. So I came by the train to Tiflis, and then in a wagon through the mountain passes.” He told me how he was taught in a little Persian school in Ararat, that when he was twelve years old he had left school and taken a hand in his father’s workshop and helped to weave Persian rugs. I pictured the large open doorway of the booth, the two at work squatting on carpet stools before the high bamboo frame on which the thing of wonder was being wrought, the peacock in it, the half-finished peacock perhaps, with gigantic tail, coming into being among living crimsons and lambent blues, brilliant scarlets and lurid yellows.
His father had been taken off by typhus before the youngster had experience enough to be able to carry on the business by himself; the mother had died long since, so Ali was left an orphan. He got work from a tailor, and sat in a little room with him, and worked all day with assiduity not less than that of the sweated journeyman of England. But things mended, and Ali Khan got orders of his own, and bought his own Singer sewing-machine and his own cloth and black sheepskin, and then in a little wooden room of his own squatted on his own carpet, and lived in independence many a happy year.
Then the Russians had come. They built their railway even right alongside the sacred mountain, and connected Ararat with Tiflis and Batum and Baku, and, indeed, with all the North. Rugs and swords went to Tiflis by train instead of by camel, and ready-made trousers and cast-off clothes came back in exchange. Then with the ready-made trousers came the Russian trader, and the almost ubiquitous German commercial traveller. Russians and Caucasians came in, and Russian officials and Cossacks, Russian police and passports. Ali’s trade grew bad. His Russian customers were hard to please, the prospect of war and massacre was what all the natives talked of, and many of his friends and customers had been called away to fight at Tabriz and Teheran. Ali Khan had looked despairingly at the future. Then Ali Mamedof had written, and he had taken his advice.
He came and settled up in this territory, indubitably Russian, though on the mountains, and found to his surprise some thousands of his countrymen there. “Would you not rather be in Persia?” I asked. “Oh, no,” he rejoined. “There is no security there, and there is no money there. Ours is a poor country, and is full of enemies. Here is much custom. I shall grow rich, and perhaps afterwards, when things are quieter, I shall return to Ararat, to spend my old age there.”
“And the Shah?” I asked. “Oh, they’ve caught him,” he replied. “He’ll come and live in the Caucasus also. It is much better for him.”
At this point he began to put his samovar up. It was nearing the daily prayer time. He went leisurely into his dwelling again and shut the windows, and passed into his inner room, where a square carpet lay.
Presently I heard the faint sound of his voice. I pictured him, as he was no doubt, kneeling on his carpet, praying in the words of his hand-written volumes to the one God—praying for the time of peace for Persia, and for all the world, and at the same time resigned and gentle before the Eternal Will.
So my acquaintance began with Ali Pasha. I think he was a noble man, and by far the most refined and courteous of the dwellers at the mill. I might almost add, though it would sound paradoxical, he was the most Christian. Nowadays surely all men are Christian, even Mahommedans, Buddhists and Confucians. It is only the name that they lack, the same religion is in all of them.
There was a woman near by who worked at a brewery and worked very hard, although she drank too much. Alimka and Fatima were her children, and they were so starved that they would rob the chickens of the waste food thrown in the yard. I noticed that Ali lent the woman money and helped her with the children. And when a Punch and Judy show came into the yard Ali subscribed more generously than anyone else so that the children might have a treat. And when I took little Jason under my care Ali backed me up. He even tried to rescue another bird and pass it on to me.
But he was very punctilious in the performance of the services of his own religion. Special praying men came in to pray for him at different times during the summer, and their loud keening sounded in my ears long after I had gone to bed. Then when the Feast of Ramazan came he lived the life of a hermit.
CHAPTER XXXII
THE SORROWING MAN
A WOMAN in Vladikavkaz, being told she could not live long, grew so much in love with the idea of death that she ordered her coffin in advance, and lay in it in her bedroom and had a mock funeral, just to see what it felt like. That was an incident rather typical of the life of the intelligentia of the place. There are many nerveless, sad, despairing people there, people with no apparent means of happiness, people of morbid imagination and a will to be unhappy. All around them Nature has outdone herself with seductive charm; the sun flashes on the mountains, the myriad flowers smile in the valleys, the happy peasantry flood the town with jovial, laughing faces, but all in vain. “The fact is,” as I said to Ivan Savilief, “Adam was only the first modern man; the peasants are still living in their Edens. All your modern Adam and Eves have got to get saved somehow.” The Baptist, who, it must be remembered, was still a peasant, and by no means one of the educated classes, was very happy. And his notion was that the sad people needed to believe; they needed faith. They got as near to happiness as it was possible for them. They got as far as feet could carry them, but for the last gulf they needed wings.
Here is a story of a Russian man, one who failed to accomplish his happiness.
A certain man had great possessions and great happiness. He had inherited broad lands and gold; he was young and strong and able to enjoy riches; and he had friends and the good opinion of the world. The cup of his happiness was broad and deep and brimming. Behold what happened to him; there came a time when he achieved the summit of earthly bliss, and then suddenly he lost all and became a man of sorrow.
He was a good man. He had kept the laws of God and of man; no one could reproach him. His mind was young and fresh and open to the influences of beauty. His heart and mind were in communion. God looked upon him and smiled, and then suddenly there came a time when, as it were, God turned away His face.
This is the story of the change. The man’s life, with its wealth and its adornment, its pillars and its towers, its sumptuous chambers and domes of pleasure was as a precious palace just completed. Within the hall the glories of his youth lay, the crowns and the laurels, the shields and the swords. They were cast there, and upon all there was erected a throne. And then the most beautiful maiden his world could give was seated upon the throne. The palace as perfection throbbed—dared to exist. The young man realised for a minute the dizziest heights of happiness.
But on his marriage eve he fell.
It had been a saying of his boyhood that the condition of happiness is that one follow unfalteringly one’s highest hope. It had always seemed to him that Hope must go on before, that however happy one became there would always be the prospect of further happiness, that one never could catch up hope. And now, behold, he stood at one with his ideal, and he felt that earth had no more to give.
On his marriage eve he communed with his heart, and having given thanks to God, as was his wont, he fell into a trance. For a space time ceased to exist for him, whilst his soul was borne away from him to unknown powers. When he awoke he was changed. The trouble and doubt that excess of joy had brought him had given way to a sort of exaltation. His light blue eyes were gentle, as if they had looked long upon the soft plumage of wings, and there was a strange radiance within them. It was the light of inspiration, the gleam of the knowledge of God. He walked as one might, having news of a great deliverance.
“The condition of happiness is that one follow unfalteringly one’s highest hope,” said he. “And when one comes level with one’s highest hope, God will destroy the old hope and give a new one. There is a dark moment at the summit of one’s mountain, and then suddenly, when the last inch upward is achieved, God gives His perfect revelation. The old cup of happiness is dashed to pieces on the rocks when one sees the Grail.”
It had come to the knowledge of the man that a greater joy than that afforded by earthly things was possible. He dimly apprehended the coming of a new fortune, of a new opportunity. Some voice within him seemed to cry, “Behold the opportunity comes; the white horse comes riding past your gate; jump on it and ride away! Something comes for which this present happiness is only a preparation. There comes an adventure worth your sword, and a true bride for your heart. There is a narrow portal to be reached, and now, even now, riseth the tide which takes you there. Only once in a lifetime comes the tide that lifts you and puts you on the high seas.”
What did it mean?
He knelt and communed With his heart. He tried to understand the Voice which spoke to him. He composed his fluttering spirit, and then prayed to God. He prayed, “What must I do, oh, God, to win eternal joy?” He prayed and waited, and his soul grew calm as a broad lake at eve. There came no answer to his prayer, but whilst he waited he became conscious of a new power. The deep silence of the world seemed to have congealed, and before him stood a great grey door.
“For each man there is a door to happiness,” said the voice in his heart; “the door is shut, but the key is in the door.”
“Yes, the key is in the door,” said he. “I could not have seen the key had I not power to open.”
Suddenly, in the calm of his heart, the young man willed to behold God and to attain supreme joy, and he knew that the Vision would be vouchsafed to him. But just as he was about to see that which he desired to behold, the Devil, in the shape of a crow, flew across the sky of his soul and alighted in his heart. The lake at eve was ruffled, and a whisper like a cold night breeze from the east sped along the surface of it and said, “You will find the true bride for your heart, but does not that mean you must renounce this earthly beauty who has just crowned the happiness of your youth? You will become as a little child and begin life again, and forego all the honour that your years and wealth have brought you. If you see God once, nothing less than God will ever satisfy you, and your eyes, having looked on that radiance, will find the world intolerably grey.”
Then a great terror sprang up in him like two contrary winds born together in a wood, and it shook his spirit. His soul was stirred up from the bottom so that it lost all its purity, and he prayed, “Oh, Lord, do not show thyself lest nothing hereafter give me joy: it is my will, take this cup from me.” The prayer was heard, and the white robe of his transfiguration was caught up into the heavens again.
He saw not the Vision.
He saw not the Vision, but since that day he cannot be satisfied by anything other than it.
So it happened that on his marriage eve he fell from the dizzy heights of happiness and became a man of sorrow. He passed, as it were, out of the favour of God. His estate decayed a little, but even the great wealth which remained was but barren gold. His mind and body grew infirm. With his bride he had no happiness. He lost the good opinion of the world, and those who once were friends pointed at him and said, “There goes a failure, a man not yet of middle age, but disillusioned and crusty.”
The man is now spending the rest of his days and he goes sadly indeed. No other opportunity has come, and he knows in himself he will never be so near again. He has become a lonely man, one who prefers his own company, and likes to look upon the sky, or at the wild things in the woods. He always appears as if he were looking for something he has lost. His eyes are wistful and sorrow—charged, his step heavy, his thoughts slow. He comes nearest to happiness on cloudy days of autumn when he attunes himself to Nature. Then he has quiet moments and little pleasures, and accidentally looking at some mouse or shrew scurrying among the yellow leaves, he laughs to himself or smiles a little. Then suddenly one might see him check himself as he catches sight of the red October sun or some dark, threatening cloud. He remembers his renunciation, his supreme denial, and is again appalled. Conscience and life will not let him forget, and he sees ever before him the reverse side of the great silent door—the door which is locked, but for which there is no key....
The man searches, the man waits. He is like a ghost that may not rest, until a mistake of the old has been set right in the new. Men become his enemies. He desperately hates the circumstances of life, the things that made up his former happiness. The face in the picture hates the frame which does not suit.
Is it not all in vain! The lost opportunity never returns; the tide never rises the second time; the White Horse never comes past the gate again. “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” “With man it is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE CUCUMBER FAIR
THE cost of living in the Caucasus is one-half of what it is in the most thriving agricultural district in Great Britain. This is because Russia is a self-supporting empire; it does not depend on other countries for its food supply. I think the comparative economic positions of England and Russia are inadequately known. In England the land has been sacrificed to manufactures; by adopting Free Trade it made a bargain with other countries in these terms—that it would manufacture iron goods and cloth in exchange for food. It gave up agriculture and it gave up the country. It became a land of towns. The people of the English towns are the English people. Russia, on the other hand, remained an agricultural country, and its manufactures have developed little. It is content to take foreign manufactured goods in exchange for its own superfluous food. The people of Russia are the peasants; the Liberals in the towns don’t really count. For town life and factory life democracy is most suitable, and for country life conservatism and squiredom—for English people democracy, for Russians autocracy. Those in England who have a strong wish to have Russia democratised are also, strange to say, Free Traders. Are they aware that if Russia becomes a manufacturing country it will need its food for itself, and will not need to buy our wares? Russia is really the employer of England. What if England loses its job?
“TURNING OVER COTTONS”
AN OSSETINE VILLAGE
The newspaper boom of the revolution has done much harm; it has given English people a false idea of Russia. That notion of Russia as a place of anarchists and gendarmes, secret societies, spies, plots, prisons is ridiculous. As after the Slaves War the Romans lined the way home by poles on which the heads of the conquered were fixed, so to the ordinary outsider appears the boundary line of Russia—a palisade of heads on poles. In truth, it is only fenced in by passport officers, unless the outworks of lies in the European press must be counted. Behind the fence, however, stands, not what so many imagine—cossacks, cannon, prisons—but an extraordinarily fertile, fruitful country, and a people happy enough to be unaware of their happiness or unhappiness. I have spoken to peasants from all parts of the country, and I have not found one who had a word to say against the Tsar, or who felt any grievance against his country’s governors.
There are a hundred millions of peasants who swear by God and the Tsar, and who believe implicitly in both God and Tsar, a hundred million strong, healthy peasants, not yet taught to read or write, not yet democratised and given a vote, not yet crammed to death in manufacturing towns. These are Europe’s unspent capital, her little store of unspoiled men set against a rainy day, the solid wall between China and the West.
It was with these thoughts uppermost in my mind that I came away from one of the July fairs at Vladikavkaz. Such revelations of the bounty of Nature in the abundance of food, and in strong limbs to be nourished by it, I scarcely expect to see easily again. This fair took place at one end of the great military road that traverses the Caucasus, and connects Tiflis and the Persian marches with Rostof and the North. In a great open square, paved unevenly with cobbles, the stalls are set up. At one end are five open forges, where horses are strapped in and shod. Behind these, about a hundred sheep and lambs struggle together, whilst a shepherd milks the ewes into a bucket. At another end of the “bazaar” there is a covered place for cotton goods, and there the Georgian girl buys her kerchief, and the peasant woman turns over all manner of brilliant printed cotton. Between the sheep and the drapery, for a full hundred yards, stand carts and barrows, or, it may be, merely sacks and baskets, full of cucumbers and tomatoes. The cucumbers are piled up on the carts like loads of stones for road-making. The vendors stand beside them and shout their prices. The customers fumble about and pick out the best they can find of the stock. Behind or below the stalls the rotten ones lie yellow and soft under the burning sun, and hens come in and peck at them. Several thousand have to be sold before afternoon; more than half will not be disposed of before they are spoiled by the sun. Picture the peasants outbidding one another, fat and perspiring in the heat. Ten for three-halfpence is the highest price, ten for a halfpenny the lowest. By two o’clock in the afternoon one will be able to buy forty for a penny, just to clear. Meanwhile children are dancing about, eating them as one would bananas in England, munching them as if they were large pears, and in a way that would have brought bewilderment to the mind of Sairey Gamp, who so clearly loved a “cowcumber.” A fortnight ago a single cucumber cost twopence—assuredly the tide has risen.
Scarcely less in evidence than the luscious green of cucumbers is the reposing yellow and scarlet of the tomatoes—golden apples they call them. These also must be disposed of; they go for a penny a pound, and the baskets of many traffickers are adorned by the purchase of them. Behind the cucumber row is the potato market, where, for sixpence, you may buy two stone of new potatoes. With these are a long array of stalls with vegetables and fruit, everything super-abundant, and at surprising prices. Raspberries and apricots go at twopence a pound, peaches at fourpence, cherries and plums at a penny, gooseberries at a halfpenny, blackberries at three-halfpence, and all this fruit in at the same time. Strawberries came suddenly at the beginning of June, and as suddenly disappeared; the summer progresses at quick pace here. New-laid eggs are sold at this fair at a farthing each, cheese at threepence a pound, butter at tenpence, bacon at fourpence and fivepence a pound. Herrings and river fish, sun-dried and cured, are sold ten on a string for twopence halfpenny; live green crayfish, ten for threepence. At shops near by, mutton is sold at threepence halfpenny, and lamb at fourpence halfpenny a pound; beef at threepence.
The fair is, however, a poor people’s market. The richer get their things at the shops, but it is difficult to persuade a peasant to buy at a shop when he can get what he wants at a fair. From time immemorial the country people have met and bargained at fairs, so that it is now in the blood. Hence it is that Russia is the country of fairs, having as its greatest object of that kind the fair of Nizhni Novgorod, that stupendous revival of the old times. The difficulty of buying at a fair is no obstacle; the crowds of people, the mountebanks among them, the stalls without scales, the haphazard bargains, and chance of bad money, are more alluring than deterrent. Potatoes are sold by the pailful, cucumbers by the ten, fish by the string, bacon and cheese by the piece, and mutton mostly by the sheep. One needs to be a connoisseur, a ready calculator and eye-measurer, if one is going to acquit oneself honourably in the eyes of the fair bargain-drivers. No one ever takes anything at the price offered; everyone chaffers and bargains for at least five minutes before settling yes or no. Then nothing bought is wrapped up. One has to bring one’s own paper with one, or one may buy earthenware pots or rush-baskets, and put together the things that may touch without harm. A pound of meat without paper puts the unprovided purchaser in a dilemma. At the fair there is no dividing line between tradesmen and buying people. Whoever wishes may go and take his place, or he may take no place, and simply hawk his things about through the crowd. There are men hawking old clothes, old boots, iced beer and ices. At ten o’clock in the morning the scene is one of the utmost liveliness. Peasants are standing round the ice-cream men and smacking their lips; would-be purchasers of mutton are standing among the sheep, weighing them and feeling them with their hands in primitive fashion; at the back of the forges meal and flour sellers, white from head to foot, are shovelling their goods into the measures of gossips; girls are raking over the cottons; the cucumber sellers are shouting; and those who have finished their buying are moving off with carts and barrows, sacks or baskets, as the case may be, and not infrequently one may see a man with a sack of potatoes in one hand and a fat sheep under the other arm.
Later in the summer this became a Melon Fair, and later still a Grape Fair. The melons were piled on the ground and resembled heaps of cannon balls, reminding me forcibly of the trophies of 1812 preserved in the Kremlin at Moscow. There were acres of the large melon, that one known as the arbuse, dark, swarthy green without, blood crimson within. This is a national fruit. It keeps well, and will be on every peasant’s table at Christmas. The deacon at Lisitchansk ate half a melon at every meal when I was there last Christmas. In August they are as plentiful as apples, and sell for a halfpenny or a farthing apiece. There are so many of them that they overflow the towns and the villages; one imagines them rolling away and filling up all the ditches if a wind came in the night. Then their colour is a delight, and it is very pleasant to see the chubby children munching big red chunks of it.
Wagons of grapes, cartloads of honey, in such terms did the season express itself as it grew older. Grapes were two pounds a penny, and honey threepence a pound! And this also was the season of chilis, which were bought in great quantities for pickling. Then vegetable marrows and beetroots overflowed the plain—beetroots too sweet for English palates. Tomatoes were eventually sold by the bucketful. Peaches came and were sold at a penny a pound, and apples at prices that it seems absurd to mention. I said to Alimka one morning, “Let’s buy twopennyworth of apples,” and we received so many that we had to return home and empty our basket before we could make any more purchases. I should only have bought a farthing’s worth. Then a very interesting feature of the fairs were the rosy cherry apples, no bigger than cherries, and very hard, but making a jam that is beautiful and delicious.
It was pleasant to note the preparations for the winter. Stores were being laid in which would not be exhausted even in the spring. The miller was making jam in the yard three times a week; even the Tatar woman below, whom Ali befriends, was taking immense stock of cheap fruit, boiling it for jam or nalivka, infusion of fruit, or drying it for compôte. Even the koutia, which will be eaten on Christmas Eve, was being prepared now. In the yards of all the houses, in the fields about the cottages, cooking and curing and pickling was going forward. Brine was prepared for the cucumbers and the fish, syrup for the jam—Russian housewives always make their jam by preparing a syrup first. Apples cut into squares, wild plums and apricots, were drying on the roofs; chains of onions three yards long, chains of dried mushrooms and baranka biscuits were being hung up on the walls. All day one smelt the savoury odours of food fresh cooked, all day one saw little urchin children like Alimka and Fatima running in and out of doors with tit-bits that they had stolen, or that an indulgent mother had dealt out. The flies buzzed about the doors and windows as if in quest of paradise.
Such is the picture of life in connection with the fairs; the picture is somewhat inadequate, but I hope it may serve to show the feeling there was of abundance. It was an exhilarating element in the atmosphere, and together with the impression of immense mountains and deep wide skies allowed one to live in the large things of life. And Russia is the land of a few large things as opposed to England, a land of many small ones. No disparagement to my native land! Russia is neither greater nor less than England, but it is different.
CHAPTER XXXIV
OVER THE CAUCASUS
1. Bareback to Kobi
I HAD given Nicholas an address, Poste Restante, Mleti, and as Mleti is in the province of Tiflis, on the other side of the mountains, it took several days’ tramping to get there. I set off one August morning. The following are pages from my diary:
Kobi, 10th August, 6 a.m.
I am sitting on the stone wall of a bridge and am spread to the sun. Last night I slept on a ledge of red porphyry rock beside some moss and grasses; the dew was very heavy and I felt cold. I don’t think I slept much, but I feel pretty fit at this moment, sitting as I am in the sun on this bridge. I got up at the first sign of dawn and went to one of the inns of the village—each village has several inns of a kind, half grocer’s shop and half wine house—dukhans they call them. The samovar was actually on the table steaming. Hot tea was wonderful after such a cold night.
KAZBEK POSTING-STATION
This village is six thousand feet up, and I should probably have slept at the posting-station, but I arrived too late last night. So I slept out again as on the last three nights. I had a very lively journey hither. I left the Kazbek Station yesterday evening, and thought to find a comfortable sleeping-place in the barley fields that lay between the road and the River Terek; but just as I was beginning my tramp an Ossetine came up with four horses and asked would I care to ride one. It was a bareback business, and I rather fought shy of it, but he pointed out a quiet horse and assured me we should go gently. We should need to go gently if I was going to feel comfortable after eighteen versts of it. There were of course neither stirrups nor saddle, and as I had a blanket across my back I made a saddle of that. I felt ridiculously stiff in the legs, for I had walked thirty miles already, but I managed to scramble on to the horse’s back. The Ossetine disengaged his horse from the other three and rode separately. I had two horses at my side. It was very uncomfortable riding, but I soon learnt what to do; how to kick him if the horse went too slow; how to cry brrrrr if I wanted him to stop. But, oh! how sore I got. After five versts I began to ride side-saddle. At six versts we stopped at a wineshop, another dukhan; there are plenty of them along the road. There is no Government monopoly of spirits on this side of the Caucasus. They can’t enforce that on a population that has produced its own wines for centuries. I did not much want to stop but the Ossetine did. He was an unprofitable companion, for utter stupidity he would be hard to be matched; he was almost totally lacking in intelligence. He put on a thoughtful look whenever he was addressed, and answered something irrelevant. I do not think he could understand any sentence in which the word wine did not occur, hence his astonishing imbecility. His face was reminiscent of the sun shining through a shower of rain, eyes and moustache wet-looking, and the latter yellow and shiny—in his eyes fore-knowledge of wine—also remembrance of wine. A boy came out of the dukhan and tied our horses to posts. The Ossetine became very gay and festive, and directly he got into the shop slapped the innkeeper on the back, and ordered sixpennyworth of white wine, which meant a bucketful. It had a look of the tea I have made from the Terek when the river has been very muddy, and it was a trifle fiery. I drank two glasses and the man had the rest. When the bucket was dry he began to be very sympathetic with me. I had only had two glasses; what a pity there wasn’t any more. Shouldn’t we have some red wine now? But I wasn’t going to buy him any more wine, and I had a wish to get to Kobi in fairly decent style, so I said, “No thanks, I don’t want any more, but if you want another drink you order it; don’t be shy on my account. I haven’t any more money.” This conference had lasted some time; it was getting darker; I did not want to arrive in Kobi after night-fall; it would then be difficult to find a soft place to encamp for the night. But the host brought in tea. This was free of charge, and so we sipped it, and played with it, while the Ossetine tried to persuade me to stand him another bucket of wine. He failed; we went out. He was drunk before we dismounted, and now he was at the fighting stage. He had separated the horses differently at the inn, so that I was with one only; and now, without a word of warning, he slashed them from behind with a whip. We went off at a gallop; he brought his two horses into line, and we went forward neck to neck full pelt for two versts as if we were a desperate cavalry charge. It was fearfully thrilling! We came to a sudden halt at a turn of the road in order to let a cart pass; we were all four horses, all scrunched and cooped up in a corner. The Ossetine swore by all his saints if he had any—he was a Mahommedan—for my horse was backing into him, and kicking out with its hind legs. Then suddenly we left the road and cantered over the moor to the Terek. The river was by no means so impetuous there as in the Dariel Gorge, and we forded it. What a kicking and splashing we made, and how the horses stumbled! I thought I should have been pitched into the water. Of course I got drenched to the knees as it was. After this I had to dismount and put my rug straight, and the first thing that happened after I got on again was most startling—the flame, flash and bang of a revolver just in front of me, and the Ossetine tearing off as if he were possessed. I thought someone had shot at him, especially as he signalled to me over his shoulder. I kicked my steed, brought him along sharply and got abreast of him. It was the Ossetine who had fired, and two minutes later he fired again. The wild man was brandishing his weapon and shouting in his own language. Then he grinned at me, and said in Russian, “No one’s going to touch me, eh?” I felt apprehension, and took good care to keep behind him. I did not want a bullet in my back. He continued to flare about, and pull up his horse at unexpected moments, and with such severity that it pawed the air. Presently, whilst we were leading our horses down some steep rocks amid a litter of stones, it seemed he fired at me. I asked him to be careful and he grinned maliciously. Then we re-forded the Terek and regained the road, which was a relief, for there is less chance of being murdered on the highway than among the rocks. The Ossetine became very sulky; he had evidently been long on the way and would be abused by his master when he got to Kobi. No pace was quick enough for him; I think if I had been thrown he would have left me by the wayside and charged ahead full gallop with the four horses. I was glad enough, therefore, when the lights of Kobi appeared. I dismounted outside the village and walked in. The wine and the tea and the gallop made me feel more queer than a rough Channel passage would have done. Then I wished I had some number to write down, that would indicate how tired my legs were of clasping that horse’s back.
I slept on the hard rock, or did not sleep, and had hot tea in the morning, and here I am. I shall take things easily to-day.
This is a beautiful place, a wide trough of black earth high up among the mountains. It has an immense sky for a mountain village, and the air is buoyant, fresh, perfect. All around are rosy porphyry rocks, and like a gleam in fairyland the sunlight comes upon them at dawn. This is the village to have a cottage in; it is perfectly beautiful and in the heart of the mountains, and is at cross-roads. Only the flowers are few; perhaps it stands too high. The water flowing under this bridge is green and clear and cold. I have just washed in it. What luxury! Within a stone’s throw is a rock out of which gushes seltzer water with iron in solution. According to the natives it cures everything, even the pain that you feel when in the mountains you come across the track of the devil.
2. Driving a Cart to Gudaour.
Gudaour, 10th August.
I have been feeling very saddle-sore, but to-day my pains are too many and too various to describe. I came over the pass on a cart this day, and was so jolted that I felt in need of internal refitting. I had been lying by the roadside at Kobi drinking in the sunshine; it was perfectly blissful. I was determined not to walk to Gudaour; it didn’t matter if I did spend a day in perfect idleness. But at noon I was aware of a vehicle crawling towards me up the road, and I thought I would ask a place in it for my weary bones. It took half an hour to come up, however, for the driver was fast asleep and the horse was going at its own sweet will, i.e., at about a mile an hour. I woke the man. He was an Armenian, a copper-coloured fellow with a black eye. When I got in, he beat the horse furiously with a thick cudgel for about half a verst distance, and then relapsed into sleep. We went at a smart pace and then slowed down. The horse kept looking backward all the time—it had no blinkers—watching its master and the angle of his cudgel. When the Armenian was fast asleep the horse resumed its original speed of one mile an hour. And so, laboriously, we climbed the ten versts to Krestovy, the ridge of the pass. The scenery was extremely beautiful and the air very cold and fresh. At Vladikavkaz I expect there were 90 or 100 degrees Fahrenheit, but here, in the shade, it was near freezing-point. The avalanche snow lay in great quantities below us, bridging the little rivers. Even now and then there was snow on the road. But we were protected from snow slides by covered ways at the most important points. The chief feature of the landscape were the cascades. Narrow silvery waterfalls dropped from ledge to ledge of the red porphyry rock. They are the prettiest things I have seen in the Caucasus, for these mountains are the places of the sublime rather than of the charming.
At six versts the Armenian collapsed backward into the cart and then woke up. The horse immediately changed speed to five miles an hour; these collapsings had evidently happened before and been followed by cudgel thumping. The driver now rubbed his eyes, and then looked at me as if seeing me for the first time. Then he seemed to recollect, asked me where I was going to, and gave me the reins. I took the seat in front, for he evidently wanted me to drive. He, for his part, spread his sheepskin cloak in the cart, and snuggled himself to go to sleep. His last words were, “Hit her hard, she’s not a horse, she’s a devil.”
At eight versts I looked behind and saw a strange cloud coming from the north. It looked like a clenched fist, and all the knuckles stood out hard with anger. I took advice and thumped the horse a little. It would not be pleasant to be caught in a storm. We got along at a better pace, the horse squinting back at me to see if I were going to sleep. It was amusing that it increased or slackened its speed as I raised or lowered the stick. It was scarcely necessary to touch the horse at all. I felt I had something in common with the conductor of an orchestra. It was a cunning horse, however, and knew that I was not its master. At the highest point of the road it stopped stock-still and refused to budge; my mild thumping had no effect. The wind had now risen to a gale and the fist of cloud had become a wide army of vapours. I got down and led the horse a little way, and then hopped to my seat while the cart was in motion. We went like this for half a verst, and then the horse made a sudden dash off the road and settled down to eat grass. More habits were displaying themselves. I got him off after some trouble, and set him going on the road again. This proceeding, which had to be repeated every verst or so, reminded me of the “Innocents Abroad” and the mules. When they wished to change direction they had to dismount, lift up the mules by the hind-quarters, and turn them to the new angles. I expect the mules would then go on a good way without stopping: my case was worse. In six versts we should be at Gudaour and could take shelter, but the rain would overtake us. The clouds were pouring over the rocks and cliffs all about, and only far away to the south spread the blue sky as yet not covered. Suddenly the clouds came drifting over the road; we were obliged to stop, and as they rolled over us and the cart they seemed to turn to rain at a touch. But we were only five minutes in the mist; we heard a long roll of thunder, and suddenly, instead of cloud it was hissing, stinging hail. The Armenian slept soundly, and I wrapped myself in my blanket and urged the horse forward. The road lay downhill and we moved quickly towards Gudaour. In an hour we arrived there and the rain had stopped; the clouds had passed over our heads and there was blue sky again. The sun shone.
We stopped at an inn in the village, and, looking down from there, could see the thunderstorm that had left us raging in the valleys of Mleti and Ananaour. The clouds were literally below us, and we saw the blue sky above them. How brightly the sun shone! it stood just beyond a little grassy summit where some sheep were browsing; it seemed that if one were there one could stretch out one’s hand and take it from its place.
The Armenian had definitely wakened up now and was preparing to have a good meal. The innkeeper lit a wood fire on the stone floor of his dwelling and prepared to do some cooking. We bargained for a chicken between us. It would cost sixpence. The chicken was already plucked, and the innkeeper threw it into a pot that he had on the fire. Whilst we waited for it to cook we had a bucket of red wine before us, and the Armenian did himself justice.
“You’re an Englishman,” said he. “You ought to know where there’s any war going on. Where’s there any war, I say? Where’s there any war?”
“In Spain,” I suggested. “The Spanish are fighting the Moors.”
“I never heard of it; there’s been a war here, you know, in Persia, but Persians are weak fellows, and the Russians are weak. Three Persians one Russian, three Russians one Armenian. Loris Melikoff, eh? Did you ever hear of him? He was the greatest general the Russians ever had, and he was an Armenian. The richest man in the world is an Armenian. He lives in London and keeps a flying machine. You are English, why don’t you use a flying machine? What does the sky look like in England? Is it full of machines? One day I shall go there. Already I know some English, brodt, bootter. The English are better than the Russians. Fine machines they have. But they break down, oh, they break down. I saw two yesterday that couldn’t get on. How would you like to plough a mountain side with one of your machines? You’d break down. But a horse wouldn’t break down; a horse for me. Do you know they wanted me to join the army, serve my time, be drilled, learn to ride and shoot. I said to the General, ‘The devil comes to me to learn to ride and shoot, who’s going to give me lessons? No Russian. I should think not. Why,’ I said, ‘you give me your hat and I’ll put it on one of these mountain peaks so far away that you can’t see it, far less fire at it, but I’ll take a gun and shoot it off.’ He said, ‘We shall have to have you all the same,’ but they wont. I’ll go to England or America first. Don’t I wish there’d come a war; we Armenians would throw off the Russians and have our own king. Dirty, vodka-drinking Russians, always begging or drinking. Directly a Russian finds five copecks he runs as hard as he can to the public-house and drinks vodka, and when he comes out of the shop, if he sees a rich man coming, he will stand at the side of the road and say ‘Give me five copecks.’ Shameless people!”
The arrival of the chicken cut short this harangue, of which I have only remembered a little. He turned out to be a wonderful conversationalist, this little man, who seemed to be without words altogether when we were in the cart. The chicken was tender. It was served to us without knives and forks and on one plate; we each took bones and picked them like heathens; with the chicken there were pickled gherkins and white bread and home-made cheese. The samovar appeared and we had tea.