From Pole to Pole: A Book for Young People

by Sven Anders Hedin

On August 15, 1885, I went by steamer to St. Petersburg. There I entered a train which ran south-eastwards through Moscow to Rostov, at the mouth of the Don, and thence on to the Caucasus; and for four days I sat in my compartment, letting my eyes rove over the immense steppes of Russia. Hour after hour the train rolled along. A shrill whistle startles the air when we come to a station, and equally sharply a bell rings once, twice, and thrice when our line of carriages begins to move on again over the flat country. In rapid course we fly past innumerable villages, in which usually a whitewashed church lifts up its tower with a green bulb-shaped roof. Homesteads and roads, rivers and brooks, fruitful fields and haystacks, windmills with long revolving arms, carts and wayfarers, all vanish behind us, and twilight and night four times envelop huge Russia in darkness.

At last the mountains of the Caucasus appear in front of us, rising up to the clouds like a light-blue wall. The whole range seems so light and impalpable that we can scarcely believe that the very next day we shall be driving up its valleys and over heights which are more than 16,000 feet above the sea-level. The distance is still great, but the white summit of Mount Kazbek shines out amidst the blue.

At length we arrive at Vladikavkas, the end of the railway,[7] and begin our journey of 130 miles over the mountains. My travelling companions hired a carriage, and at every stage we had to change horses. I sat on the box, and at the turns I had to hold on lest I should be thrown off down into the abyss at the side of the road.

We constantly meet peasants with asses, or shepherds with flocks of goats and sheep. Now comes a group of Caucasian horsemen in black sheepskin coats and armed to the teeth; then the post-cart, packed full of travellers; then again a load of hay drawn by oxen or grey buffaloes.

The higher we ascend, the grander and wilder the mountains become. Sometimes the road is blasted out of perpendicular walls of rock, and heavy masses of mountain hang like a vault above us. At dangerous slopes, where the road is exposed to avalanches in spring, it runs through tunnels of masonry. When an avalanche dashes furiously down the mountain it leaps over these tunnels and continues down on the other side without doing the road any harm.

We have now reached the highest point of the road, and after a journey of twenty-eight hours we arrive at Tiflis, the largest town in Caucasia, and one of the most curious towns I have seen. The houses hang like clusters of swallows' nests on the slopes on both sides of the Kura River, and the narrow, dirty streets are crowded with the fifteen different tribes who dwell in Caucasia.

While the road leading to Tiflis over the mountains is grand, a more dreary country can hardly be conceived than that crossed by the railway between Tiflis and Baku: endless steppes and deserts, greyish-yellow and desolate, with occasionally a caravan of slowly moving camels. A violent storm arose as we drew near the sea. Dust rose up in clouds and penetrated through all the chinks of the compartment, the air became thick, heavy, and suffocating, and outside nothing could be seen but a universal grey veil of impenetrable mist. But the worst was that the storm struck the train on the side, and at last the engine was scarcely able to draw the carriages along. Twice we had to stop, and on an ascent the train even rolled back a little.

However, in spite of all, we at last reached the shore of the Caspian Sea, where clear green billows rose as high as a house and thundered on the strand. At seven o'clock in the evening we were at Baku, and drove ten miles to Balakhani, where I remained seven months.

I remember that time as if it were yesterday. I struggled hopelessly with the Russian grammar, but made great progress in Persian, and learned to talk the Tatar language without the least difficulty. Meanwhile I indulged in plans for a great journey to Persia. How it was to be managed I did not know, for my means were not large. But I made up my mind that through Persia I would travel, even if I went as a hired servant and drove other people's asses along the roads.