Noble Six Hundred!”
We visited the little village of Balaklava, and in a Russian rowboat paddled in the miniature land-locked harbor and out to its entrance, where we danced on the waves that rolled inward from the sea. Then we drove to Baidar, a miserable village, where we supped on tea, eggs, and bread, and breakfasted on eggs, bread, and tea—nothing else—and slept on beds of the most impromptu character. I covered myself with my overcoat and travelling shawl, the Judge solaced himself with a table-cloth and a fish-net, while the “Doubter” was kept warm by a late copy of the London Times in addition to his overcoat. It was a rough night, and we were off early in the morning, as, indeed, anybody would be with such accommodations. If you want to get a man up in good season, put him to sleep on a pile of rocks, or a bed that dates from the Silurian period, with the chief qualities of roughness and solidity.
The “Doubter” averred his belief that there was not so bad a hotel in all Russia as the one he occupied in Baidar; and ever afterwards when we wished to get him into a regular cast-iron passion we had only to refer to his night’s lodging in the interior of the Crimea. And I really think that he was unfairly treated, as the Judge afterward made confession of having taken away the full sheet of the Times soon after they retired, thus leaving the “Doubter” nothing but “the supplement.”
An hour after leaving Baidar we passed through a stone gateway, and came out upon the sea. Or, rather, we came out upon the edge of a mountain, and looked down more than a thousand feet upon the waters kissed by the rising sun, and broken into little billows just touched with crests of foam by a gentle breeze from the east. Away on the horizon and below our line of sight lay a stratum of white clouds, and in the far distance to the left the wind and sun were chasing away the remains of the darkness of the November night, and near at hand on the right and left lay the mountains with great, rugged tops, round which half a dozen eagles were whirling and occasionally disappearing in the floating masses of light clouds. Down below, toward the upper; part of the peninsula, the mountains sloped away but so slightly as to make us wonder how we would find a passage among them.
I have become familiar with a good deal of scenery in the past twenty years, but I know few things that can surpass this first view of the sea on the road from Sevastopol to Yalta. The scene bursts suddenly upon you. At one minute you are among the hills and forests and sparsely scattered fields, where you have been travelling ever since you left Balaklava, and you are voting the whole thing a trifle monotonous. You pass through the gateway, which is arched and bastioned like a small fortress, and what a change in the picture! You are in a narrow road, with scarcely sufficient standing place for the carriage and horses; the crag at your left seems ready to topple over and cover you, and as you look up a thousand or twelve hundred feet along its gray sides, you perceive deep and irregular fissures in which, here and there, trees are clinging quite safe from the woodman’s axe, and forming a secure resting for the eagles that circle about them. Their prevailing grey color is diversified by the tints peculiar to volcanic rocks everywhere, and they cut the sky with a sharp and jagged outline whose every angle is rendered more distinct by the great elevation to which the mountains rise above you. This mountain-chain stretches about thirty miles along the coast; it stands bold and upright from the sea above Balaklava, but gradually trends away from the water until, at Yalta, it is more than five miles distant.
Here, at the Baidar-gate, the strip of land is nearly a mile wide, but as you look down the dizzy distance you could solemnly aver that the width is not more than a hundred yards. The strip of land shelves rapidly, and is dotted with patches of forest, rough boulders, and the general debris of the mountain-chain, and stippled and streaked with little rivulets that trickle onward toward the sea. There are sharp ridges and deep ravines, barren patches and woody dells; the whole forming a favorite resort of the game-birds and the beasts that make this region an attractive one for the hunter.
Here and there you see a house nestling and crouching in a lovely valley, and as you proceed on your way you find the houses and villas becoming every hour more and more numerous. The high cliffs shelter the land from northerly winds, and as the sun pours full and strong over the sea, a climate of peculiar warmth is developed that gives this part of the Crimea a fertility of almost tropical luxuriance. The productions of this region are of wonderful variety and excellence.