It had never been our intention to enter Armenia by the well-beaten avenue of Trebizond and Erzerum. The season was advanced; our first objective was Ararat; and it appeared doubtful whether, even with the utmost possible expedition, we should be able to accomplish the ascent of the mountain before the commencement of the winter snows. The attack is no doubt feasible from the side of Turkey; at least on two occasions it has been successful; but the journey is long from Erzerum to Bayazid, and the stages must be covered by your own horses; there is no posting system to furnish you with relays. Nor is it likely that you will find the same facilities at Bayazid that are offered in Russian territory, through the courtesy of the Russian Government, by the detachment of Cossacks which is stationed on the northern slopes. These considerations were decisive in determining us upon the approach from Georgia; but I was also anxious on other grounds to become acquainted with the Russian provinces of Armenia before investigating the condition of those under Turkish rule. With these purposes we rejoined our steamer on the night of the 16th of August and continued the voyage to Batum.
August 17.—From Trebizond to the Russian port is a run of a hundred miles; the early morning saw us skirting the redoubts that line the shore and doubling the little promontory on which the lighthouse stands. In the bight or tiny inlet that recedes from that low headland a depth of water of some thirty fathoms may be found; yet the bay as a whole is shallow and full of silt, and it is only on this western side, close in upon the land, that such soundings are obtained. The largest vessels may be seen brought up so near to the beach that their lofty sterns almost overhang its shelving slopes. But the space is not extensive in this favoured quarter, and if this natural harbour is protected on the east by the wall of the coast range, it is exposed towards the north. The Russians have endeavoured to overcome these disadvantages by constructing a long breakwater of solid masonry, which projects from the side of the mountains into the bay; for years they have been engaged in dredging operations, but they have been hampered by the continual tendency of the anchorage to fill with sandy deposit along the eastern shore.
I should not trouble or divert my reader with a humble incident of travel, were it not that I am anxious to dispel the prevailing prejudices which attribute an unusual degree of severity to the service of the customs at this port. Some years ago, when returning from Persia to Europe, I had been summoned to the fearful presence of the presiding officers and had been amiably dismissed; but on that occasion I was invested with the more innocent character of an export, whereas now it was with the savoury attributes of imports from Great Britain that we were walking into the lion’s mouth. Stories were abroad of ladies who had arrived in silken dresses and who had been seen to issue from the portals of this redoubtable Custom-House in whatever garments may have escaped the confiscation from their persons of the more valuable products of European looms. It was therefore with some apprehension and not without anxiety that we awaited the arrival of the inspector and his men. Their white caps and white tunics are soon in evidence on the ship’s ladder; they step on deck, appear uncertain and desirous of information; then, after a cast or two, we see them settling to the line. In a remote corner of the deck, almost covered by the gigantic frame of Rudolph, lies a pile of miscellaneous but extremely creditable luggage, of which the hapless owners are ourselves. When the Swiss is interrogated he smiles blandly; the salute on their side is not less gracious and more effusive; then they leave the steamer and we are free. What is the incident? If you measure it by the paradoxical nature of the occurrence, it was more than an incident, it was an event. For the rest we were not slow to discover the explanation; there is not in Russia a more courteous official or kinder personality than the Director of Customs at Batum. M. de Klupffell is a veteran sportsman, and, as such, a friend of Englishmen; in my cousin he found an ardent votary of his own science and a companion in its pursuit; and we were linked together by a number of pleasant memories before the day of departure hurried us apart.
Five valuable days, of which not a minute was vacant, were consumed in completing the preparations for our journey and in procuring a supplementary supply of letters of introduction to those in authority at the centres through which we should pass. We were about to enter a country which, both for strategical and political reasons, is hedged in with scarcely visible but extremely palpable restrictions, and for the unprepared and ill-recommended traveller is almost of the nature of forbidden ground. There are wide districts in which our consul at Batum is not permitted to travel; I am sure he would not venture to cross the threshold of Kars. To make certain of being allowed to move about without hindrance and to enjoy the luxury of the confidence that your presence will be tolerated and that you will not suddenly be summarily expelled, it is necessary to supply yourself with a special authorisation from the proper Minister at St. Petersburg. But our ambassador at the Russian capital refuses to put forward the application; he has made a rule which nothing will induce him to break through. At Constantinople our embassy is of course completely helpless; there remains the doubtful method of private approach. The days were swelling into weeks while we lingered on the Bosphorus; it was useless to proceed without some form of pass in our pockets, but the precious months of summer were gliding away. At length we were sufficiently provided with recommendations to be warranted in trusting fortune to do the rest; we owed much to the kindness of our Russian acquaintances at Constantinople, and we were able to realise a fact of which we subsequently received such abundant evidence, that the highest Russian officials are as a rule enlightened men of the world as well as the kindest and most hospitable of hosts.
On the side of Georgia there are two principal approaches to Armenia, and the traveller who desires to consult his comfort may be advised to restrict his choice to these two roads. The more westerly ascends the valley of the Kur river and reaches the highlands about Akhaltsykh by the romantic gorge and passage of Borjom; the other, further east, leaves the railway between the Black Sea and the Caspian at the station of Akstafa, some fifty miles below Tiflis, and, mounting from the trough of the Kur along the course of the Akstafa, issues upon the open country on the west of Lake Sevan, near the posting-stage of Delijan.[1] A bifurcation at that point leads by one branch to Alexandropol and by the other to Erivan. You may ride in a victoria and with relays of post-horses on either of these roads. Both conduct you from the steppes at the southern foot of Caucasus and from levels that are comparatively low across or aslant the grain of the peripheral ranges to the edge of the Armenian tableland. Those ranges are the continuation upon the east of the mountains which we have followed from the Bosphorus to Batum; they stand up like a wall from the flats of the Rion and from the plains which border the lower course of the Kur, with much the same appearance as we saw them rise with ever-increasing proportions along the floor of the Black Sea. Beyond those lowlands a mighty neighbour, the parallel chain of Caucasus, faces them on the north. Only at one point do these two great systems join hands together, in the belt of mountainous country which separates the watershed of the Kur from that of the Rion and which the railway crosses by the pass of Suram (about 3000 feet). This linking chain is known to geographers under the name of the Meschic or Moschic; geologists are inclined to connect it with the structure of Caucasus; our senses might invest it with a separate existence, a transverse barrier as it were, thrown from range to range across the hollow which extends from sea to sea.
I was disinclined for several reasons to traverse this barrier, so that we might avail ourselves of either of the main roads. Erivan was our destination, the railway and the valley of the Akstafa our readiest means of access; but I was already familiar with the trough of the Kur between Tiflis and the Caspian, and I had read so many accounts of this approach to Armenia that the natural features of the several stages between the Georgian river and Lake Sevan seemed imprinted upon my mind. I was also anxious to gain some knowledge of the western portion of the tableland, of which I had only succeeded in obtaining from the literature of travel a wholly insufficient idea. To these districts the route by Borjom is at once the best-known avenue and that which combines with a lavish display of magnificent scenery the comforts of a beaten track. But to worm myself up the valley of the Kur to the Armenian highlands was, I thought, to miss an occasion which might not subsequently be offered of realising at the outset of our long journey the essential features and characteristics of the country we had come to see. In Asia so vast is the scale upon which Nature has operated, so much system has she bestowed upon her works, you may follow for hundreds of miles the same manifestations, till from some favourable point of vantage you may discover unfolded before you the clue and the abiding principles of her extensive and majestic plan. What approach was better calculated to offer large views over Nature and to instruct us in her designs than one which scaled the walls of the girdle ranges where they tower highest above land and sea? From Batum it might be possible to penetrate the mountains of Ajara, and debouch upon some of the most elevated regions of the plateau from which the upper waters and earliest affluents of the Kur decline; but the lower reaches of the Chorokh and its alpine tributaries intersect a most intricate and savage country, where the process of elevation has resulted in dislocation of the range, and has produced convulsions which, while they afford a most interesting field to the geologist and to the student of mountain-structure, have placed obstacles in the way of human communications which the traveller is not required to overcome. By following the bend of the chain up the coast and along the Rion until it again assumes a normal course, he may avoid this knot of ridges and maze of valleys and at the same time obtain a clearer and more definite conception of the geography of these lands. We learnt that there was a road from the plain of the Rion up the side and to the summit of the range; we soon decided upon the superior attractions which it promised, and took our tickets for the capital of the country on the west of the Meschic barrier, the ancient city of Kutais.
August 22.—Rain was falling as we slowly steamed away from the station; it is almost always raining at Batum. The clouds cannot leap the gigantic bulwark of the mountains at this south-eastern angle of the sea; they cling to the fir-clad slopes or put out hands and scale the escarpments until they become exhausted and dissolve. The town was soon behind us as we wound along the foot of the range on the narrow respite of the shore—Batum, with her grim defiance of the written law of Europe, with her peaceful situation at the gate of the oil industry, of which she receives the products by the railway from the Caspian to distribute them over all the world; a creation of modern Russia on the familiar official pattern of spreading boulevards with fine shops and large hotels. Here is the starting-point of the first train which skirts the coast of the Euxine—and even this remote example of the species turns aside from the mysterious seaboard to the cities of the interior after a brief space of some twenty miles. Yet within such limits we are carried through the wildest piece of country that may be found between the mouth of the river Rion and the entrance to the Black Sea, a district endowed with extraordinary fertility, which still remains unexploited and unreclaimed. It is inhabited here and there by a few straggling settlements, which contrast to the splendour of his natural surroundings the squalor of uncivilised man. We have outreached the furthest extension of the fringe of Greek elements; Georgian peoples live in the valleys of the interior and are thinly scattered upon the malarious coast; while further east, where the chain has left the sea and is aligned upon the plains, lowlands as well as mountains, the skirts of the range and its innermost recesses are the home of a population of Georgian race. Between Trebizond and the Russian fortress first the Lazis and then the Ajars may perhaps be regarded as transitional factors to the new order which commences after you have left Batum. I should not venture to pronounce upon the racial connections of the Lazis; they may represent the aboriginal occupants of their country, the wild tribes who harassed the army of Xenophon and were the settled plague of the Byzantine governors and of the emperors of the Comnenian line. The Ajars would appear to be of mixed parentage; like the Lazis they profess the Mohammedan faith. The Georgian districts which we are now entering still retain the names of the several independent principalities to which they formerly belonged, and except in the case of Abkhasia, up in the north at the foot of Caucasus, the Christian religion almost exclusively prevails. First comes Guria along the shore and the bend of the mountains; Imeritia extends on either bank of the Rion and as far as the pass of Suram; Mingrelia is the name of the country on the north of the Kolchian river, and it is bounded by Imeritia in the east.
For a distance of some fifteen miles the landscape was monotonous; on the one hand the almost vertical bulwark of the mountains, on the other the little grey waves breaking on the stony shore. But just before we arrived at the station of Kobulety the oppressive proximity of the range was relaxed, the country opened, and between low forest and maize-grown clearings the soil-charged waters of a river wound their way down towards the sea. It was the commencement of the scenery which is characteristic of Guria, a tract of virgin woodland which clothes the spurs of the receding chain and the alluvial flats and marshes of the coast. Rolling hills take the place of the abrupt wall of rock; they are covered with a jungle of bush and little trees, which is broken here and there by irregular patches planted with Indian corn. Dark streams heavy with loam descend between high banks. Not a village could we see, nor any human habitation; distant prospects were obscured by a veil of mist. Yet the day was fairly fine, and, if the clouds were deeply banked on the horizon, the zenith often burst to pure blue. As we proceeded, the forest increased both in grandeur and in luxuriance; clusters of magnificent trees rose from the bush and above the brushwood, until the features of hill and spur became lost beneath the lofty overgrowth and transformed to masses or ledges of tall stems and spreading branches outlined against the sky. The withered forks of lifeless trunks stood out in grim relief from this ground of shadow, or were projected in weird tracery upon the field of light—an eloquent proof that no human hand had yet disturbed the natural order of these primeval woods. The sea was lost behind leafy brakes festooned with luscious creepers, which flourish with almost tropical development in this warm climate and upon this soaking soil. Not a single road did we see; the stations are mere stages, and the only sign of the presence of man was one of the long-legged dappled pigs so common in Imeritia, which was trespassing on the line.
Such are the characteristics which broadly prevail between Kobulety and Lanchkhuty, a space of some twenty-four miles. But we had not yet reached the latter station, which is situated due north of the capital of Guria, Ozurgeti, when new features were discovered in the scene. On the left hand the view opened across an even country where the sappy stems and reed-like forms and flowers of the maize-plants alternated with stretches of unreclaimed bush; and in the distance a bold hill, only partially wooded, projected into the plain from a long, vague line of mountains which closed the horizon on the north. We felt that these must surely be the spurs of Caucasus, and that the Phasis would shortly be disclosed.
You cross that fabled river—the modern Rion—by the commonplace method of a railway bridge; it flows between high banks through the wide expanse of these surroundings on the southern margin of the plain. Some distance east of these lower reaches the impetuous current that has pierced the Caucasus, from which it issues at Kutais, has been deflected by the mountains of the southern border, which turn it towards the west. You do not follow its tortuous course, which skirts the outworks of these mountains as they stretch inwards from the coast; the ground is flat, the railroad points more directly for the capital at the foot of the great chain on the north.