As I sat on my balcony at six o’clock in the morning, with my glass of tea and that leathery ring of bread they call a ‘bublik,’ which forms the regular breakfast of a Russian, the only things stirring in the streets below were the ‘dworniks’ (watchmen), and a few lumbering peasants’ carts coming into the bazaar. I was thankful, when the day grew older and the streets more lively, to leave my room and go in search of something more like an English breakfast, before beginning the business of the day; and though I had some difficulty in getting the waiter to supply me with anything more solid than aërated bread at such an early hour, I did eventually succeed in a capital hotel (the name of which I am sorry to have forgotten), which I thenceforth made my home.
My first business was, of course, to find out our English consul—a duty which, if travelling Englishmen always observed, would conduce materially to their comfort. It is besides a piece of courtesy which ought not to be neglected. To a Londoner, who does not know the way to any place, the first thing that suggests itself is to hail a cabman, whom he looks upon as an unfailing pilot. Acting on this belief in the unerring topographical knowledge of the race of Jehus, I hailed a droshky, and having carefully explained to the driver where I wanted to go, sank back in the cab, giving myself up in perfect trust to the guidance of my pilot, and rapidly forgetting everything but the scene in the streets we were passing through. A more perfect mélange than Tiflis is impossible. There are no two houses alike; there are no two groups of gossipers by the way speaking the same dialect; in every street there are a score of costumes belonging to different nationalities; and, as I afterwards found out, you can, by leaving these main thoroughfares, dive into yet another world and a worse Babel, by turning down towards the river and entering the bazaar.
Shops there seemed to be many and good; one of the best in the place being kept by a Scotchman. The most attractive to the European are those in which they sell Persian work, cushions, carpets, and arms. In making purchases in these, it is as well, however, to take a friend with you, who knows something of the wares offered for sale, as well as their approximate value, and the tricks of their vendors. By doing this I certainly in purchasing things to fit up a smoking-room at home spent barely 100l. in place of about 250l., the sum to which the original demands of the tradesmen for each separate item would have amounted. Nothing annoys a foreigner more, I think, than this enforced haggling over the price of every purchase.
But to hark back to my cabman. After driving me all over Tiflis, through the main street, up back slums that finally ended in waste hillside, and into squares which had no exit, and contained nothing but shops on a kind of second story—after hailing and haranguing some dozens of passers-by—he pulled up, and told me with much complacency there was no English consul, but that he would find me two or three other consuls, French, German, &c., if they would do as well. For a moment I was puzzled what to do, as my hotel-keeper had been unable to give me the address I wanted, and I hardly knew where else to ask for it now my Jehu had failed me. But a telegraph-post gave me an inspiration. Where those tall slim posts are, there must be an Englishman or a German not far off; and telling my cabby to drive to the telegraph station, I soon found all I wanted, as well as a kind friend in the person of the chief of the telegraphists, Herr Günzel.
Our consul, I found, was just the man to help me—an old Indian officer and shikaree, to whom all my wants were perfectly comprehensible. To Captain Lyall I owe much for his ever-ready help and hospitality. With him and Herr Günzel I passed the next few days, calling upon the dignitaries of Tiflis, presenting my letters of introduction, and obtaining all the information I could collect relative to Lenkoran and the game to be found there.
With one solitary exception (Prince Gagarin, once governor of the Lenkoran district) I was told by every one that large game abounded, and tigers were things of everyday occurrence. Alas! I listened to the many, and, in spite of my own conscience, closed my ears to the one. One Russian gentleman upon whom I called showed me a letter just received from an Englishman engaged in writing a monograph on crocuses, asking for his assistance to obtain certain bulbs of this flower supposed to exist at Lenkoran. I did my best, as I promised my friend I would do, to obtain some bulbs during my stay by the Caspian; but as there were no leaves above ground, and as the natives don’t take any notice of flowers, or know one from another, I was completely foiled in my attempt.
The number of musical instruments in the streets of Tiflis would lead one to believe that the population is a most musical one. My old enemy, the barrel-organ, turned up here in great force, especially about the German colony. The Armenians seem most fond of it, and during my short stay in Tiflis I twice saw a droshky containing a couple of Armenians evidently on the spree, with organ and organ-grinder crowded in on the top of them, playing away his hardest, while, with beaming faces which plainly testified that they were doing the correct thing according to their lights in the best style, they rattled through the streets. Those who know these people will tell you that it is their favourite folly, when they have had a little too much to drink, to engage an organ-grinder by the day, drive him about playing over them, until they have called at so many ‘cabaks’ on the way as to render their seats in the droshky insecure, and then, alighting at their favourite drinking-den, enthrone their grinder on the table round which they sit, and to the tunes of their beloved instrument succumb gloriously to the united charms of Bacchus and Apollo.
Next morning they go home from the gutter with a consciousness of having spent a happy day, as a happy day ought to be spent, and regard its memory as a thing to be proud of. It seems a strange thing, but in Russia and amongst these people the peasants envy a drunkard instead of pitying him. Drunkenness is to them a highly desirable condition, and shame for it they cannot understand. The most popular Englishman who ever lived and travelled amongst the Caucasian tribes owed his popularity entirely to the enormous quantity of strong drink he could absorb without doing himself any harm. The Circassians themselves have an almost incredible facility for drinking large quantities of wine without any apparent harm.
A propos of wine, the wine of the country, or rather one of the wines of the country, the Kachketinsky wine, both red and white, is admirable, and far superior to any of the imported wines to be met with at Tiflis. There is another wine which is a good deal drunk by the ladies, called ‘Donskoi.’ It is something like Moselle, red in colour and unbearably sweet to the palate. The people drink vodka and rough native wine in their ‘cabaks’ and ‘duchans,’ as well as a rough kind of beer, very sweet, and more like what mead must have been than like any beer of to-day. Tiflis itself is full of beer-halls, but these are rather for the military and the Germans than for the natives. These Germans are, I fancy, an unpopular race in the Caucasus as well as in Russia, not from any inherent vice in their natures, but from the fact that, being more civilised than their neighbours, they utterly refuse to mix with them, living apart in their colonies, with their own society, school, and church, prospering beyond any other settlers, and by their staid sobriety and orderly, thrifty life, forming a contrast to the life around them too favourable to themselves to be pleasing to their neighbours. ‘Nemets’ and ‘colbasnik’—dummy and sausage-eater—are the sobriquets in which they rejoice.
On the fourth day after my arrival at Tiflis the town, in spite of its novelty and ever-varying scenes, began to pall upon me, and with some difficulty I arranged a shooting expedition to the neighbouring steppe of Kariâs. Here the Grand Duke holds his shooting parties, and enormous are the bags made, though the festivities are of such a nature as one would imagine to interfere considerably with the shooting. But, alas! for us, there were to be no royal forests with innumerable beaters and any quantity of boars and tall red deer. Our hunting grounds were the wide steppelands outside the viceregal preserves, where antelopes (subgutturosæ) and all the ruffians who are wanted by the Government at Tiflis do mostly congregate.