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.