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.”