Through Russian Central Asia
I
LEAVING VLADIKAVKAZ
IN the early spring of 1914 I walked once more to the Kazbek mountain. It was really too early for tramping, too cold, but it was on this journey that I decided what my summer should be. Once you have become the companion of the road, it calls you and calls you again. Even in winter, when you have to walk briskly all day, and there is no sitting on any bank of earth or fallen tree to write a fragment or rest, and when there is no sleeping out, but only the prospect of freezing at some wretched coffee-house or inn, the road still lies outside the door of your house full of charm and mystery. You want to know where the roads lead to, and what may be on them beyond the faint horizon’s line.
So it is March, and I am walking out from Vladikavkaz on the Georgian road, and only on a four days’ journey—to the Kazbek mountain and back. Indeed, the road beyond is probably choked with snow, and there is no further progress. But I shall see how the year stands on the Caucasus.
The stillness of the morning—a circumambient silence. A consciousness of the silence in the deep of space. Three miles of level highway stretch straight and brown from the city on the steppes to the dark, blank wall of the mountains. Beyond the black wall and above it are the snow-mantled superior ranges, and above all, almost melting into the deep blue of the Caucasian sky, the glimmering, icy-wet slopes of the dome of the Kazbek. The sun presides over the day, and as a personal token burns the brow, even though the feet tread on patches of crisp snow on the yellow-green banks of the moor. No lizards basking in the sun, no insects on the wing, no flowers—not a speedwell, not a cowslip, not a snowdrop. Only little flocks of siskins rising unexpectedly from sun-bathed hollows like so many fat grasshoppers. Only an occasional crazy brown leaf that scampers over the withered fallen grass. There is vapour over the plumage-like woods on the hills, but no birds are singing. Nature can almost be described in negation, she shows so little of her glory; yet she makes the heart ache the more.
Persian stone-breakers, hammer in hand, sitting on mats by the side of the heaps of rocks; primitive carts lumbering with their loads of faggots or maize-straw or ice; horsemen like centaurs because of their great black capes joining their head and shoulders to little Caucasian horses—that is all the life at this season of the year of the one great highway over the mountains, the great military road from Vladikavkaz to Tiflis—no motor-cars, no trams, no light-rolling carriages with gentry in them, no trains.
Stopping at a sunny mound to have lunch, you hear from a hundred yards away the River Terek like the sound of a wind in the forest, the impetuous stream rushing between white crusts of frozen foam and washing greenly against ice-crowned boulders. For sixty miles the road is that of the valley of the Terek. It passes the Redant and then becomes the visible companion of the river, winding with it among the primeval grandeur of its rocks. The Kazbek begins to disappear, hidden by its barrier cliffs—its Kremlin; but for a mile or so its snowy cap remains in sight over the great lopsided, jagged crags. The blue smokes of Balta and red-roofed nestling Dolinadalin rise into the afternoon sky. The road enters the chilling shadow of the Gorge of Jerakhof, and you look back regretfully on the red sunlit strand behind you. The white-framed Terek moves in a grand curve through a broad wilderness of stones and snow. An icy mountain draught creeps from the cleft in the grey cold rocks. On the deserted road the telegraph poles and wires assume that sinister expression which they have in vast and lonely mountain tracts. The opening by which you entered the gorge becomes a purple triangle, and far above you and behind you glimmers the tobacco-coloured sunlit Table Mountain.
The road becomes narrower: on the one hand the river roars among ice-mantled rocks, on the other the black silt continually trickles and whispers. The faint crimson of sunset lights the wan towers of Fortoug, and then one by one the yellow stars come out like lamps over the mountain walls.
There are three inns between Vladikavkaz and the Kazbek mountain. I stayed at the second, at Larse, and made my supper with some thirty Georgians, Ossetines, and Russians, workmen on the road and chance travellers. Here I heard many rumours of the commercial destiny of the military road, of the thirty-verst tunnel that it is necessary to make, of the Englishman named Stewart, the “Boss of the Terek”—Khosaïn Tereka—who has the contract to supply the whole of the Caucasus with electricity, who will or will not make an electric power station in the shadow of Queen Tamara’s castle, needing an artificial waterfall three hundred sazhens high.
“But the project has grown cold,” said I.