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.