Russia, as Seen and Described by Famous Writers

by Unknown

ANTONIO GALLENGA

From Yalta to Sebastopol there are two routes. One strikes across the Yaïla hills to Simpheropol, whence we could proceed by rail to Sebastopol; the other runs along the coast, high up on the hills, to the Baidar Gate and through the Baidar Valley leading to Balaclava and the other well-known spots encompassing the ruins of what was once the great naval station of the Russians on the Black Sea.

We chose the coast route, and travelled for five hours in the afternoon over forty-eight versts of the most singular road in the world.

It rambles up and down along the side of the hills—as a road did once on the beautiful Cornice along the Ligurian Riviera—midway between the upper hill crest and the sea, having on the right the mountains, a succession of wall-like, perpendicular, hoary cliffs, between 1,500 feet and 2,000 feet high, a great wall riven into every variety of fantastic shapes of bastions, towers, and pyramids, all bare and rugged, crumbling here and there into huge boulders, strewn along the slopes down to the road, across the road, and further down to the water-edge, a scene which might befit the battle-field of the Titans against the gods; and on the left the wide expanse of the waters, with a coast like a fringe of little glens and creeks and headlines, and the sun's glitter on the waves like Dante's "tremolar della marina" on the shore of Purgatory.

Between the road and the sea far below us, in the distance, embosomed in woods still untouched by the autumn frosts, lay the marine villas of Livadia, Orianda, Alupka, etc., very Edens, where on their first annexation of the Crimea the wealthy Russians sought a refuge against the horrors of their wintry climate; more recently, Imperial residences—Livadia, the darling of the late Emperor; Orianda, now a mere wreck from the recent conflagration, the seat of the Grand Duke Constantine; Alupka, the abode of Prince Woronzoff, the son of the benevolent genius of these districts, the road-maker, the patron of Yalta, the second founder of Odessa.

A scene of irresistible enchantment is the whole of what the Russians emphatically call their "southern coast." And, as if to enhance its charm by contrast, everything changes as you pass the Baidar Gate, and when you have crossed the Baidar Valley the balmy air becomes raw and chill, the bald mountains tame and common-place, and the long descent is through an ashy-gray country, swept over by an icy blast, saddened by a lowering sky, unrelieved by a flower, a bush, or a cottage. So marvellous is the power of mere position, so great the difference between the two sides of the same mountain-wall! You pass at once from a garden to a steppe.

Away from these sheltering rocks, away from the southern slopes of the Caucasian ridges, you are in Russia. The only mountains throughout all the rest of the Tsar's European territories are the Urals, which nowhere reach even the heights of the Apennines, which do not form everywhere a continuous chain, and which run in almost a straight line from north to south. From the icy pole the wind sweeping over the frozen ocean and the snowy wastes of the northern provinces finds nowhere a hindrance to its cruel blasts, and spreads its chill over the whole land with such steady keenness as to make the climate of the exposed parts of the Black Sea coast almost as wintry as that of the White Sea. At Odessa in the early days of October both our hotel and the private houses we had occasion to enter had already put up double doors and windows, and people lived in apartments as hermetically closed as if their homes had been in St. Petersburg.

We slept at Baidar, a Tartar village, where a maiden of that Moslem race was the only attendant at the Russian inn, and on the morrow we drove in three hours to Sebastopol, a distance of forty-two versts.

Sebastopol has still not a little of that Pompeian look which it bore on the day after its surrender to the Western Allies in 1856. We drove through miles of ruins, the roofless walls staring at us from the dismantled doors and windows, the dust from the rubbish-heaps of brick and mortar blinding us at every turning of the streets, though, we were told, the city is looking up and thriving, and both house-rent and building-ground are rising in price from day to day.

We had to wait two days for the "Olga," detained by stress of weather, and it was with a hope of enlivening ourselves that, under the escort of the English Consul, a Crimean veteran who takes care of the heroic dead, and actually lives with as well as for them, we drove out to some of the eleven English cemeteries, to the house where Lord Raglan died, and the monument marking the spot where "the six hundred rode into the jaws of death"—those localities made forever memorable by a war than which none was ever undertaken with less distinct aims, none fought with greater valour, none brought to an end with less important results.