Long trains of tank cars stood on the sidetracks at almost every station, either loaded with oil for Batoum or empties on their way back to Baku to be refilled. One of the most important oil companies built its own pipe lines following the railway across the entire Caucasus from Baku to Batoum, but the weaker and less wealthy operators use the railway. There is an odour of petroleum almost the entire distance, chiefly because the locomotives burn that kind of fuel, but also owing to the continual leakage of the tank cars along the track. The track between the rails is black with oil almost the entire distance between the Caspian and the Black Seas, which keeps down the dust, although it is an accidental and not an intentional device.
The passenger cars are large, the seats are wide, low, and comfortable, and in the first-class coaches are arranged so that they can be made up into beds at night like those in the ordinary European sleeping car, although every passenger who desires to utilize them in that way must bring his own sheets, blankets and pillow. The cars are divided into compartments, and the only objection is that there is but one small, high window in each compartment, so that it is impossible to see the country you are passing through unless you stand up or go out into the corridor, which is lighted in a similar way. The first-class passengers except ourselves were military officers and their families, and they all wore their uniforms and swords, high-topped boots and heavy overcoats, notwithstanding the hot weather.
The first third of the distance from Batoum to Tiflis is a level plain, called a steppe in Russia, which is thoroughly cultivated, but the farm homes are wretched wooden hovels. We saw the women working in the fields—which they have to do to keep the pot boiling, for the men are in the army, drawing no wages and producing nothing.
There is a good deal of timber, and we saw several droves of scraggy-looking cattle on the hillsides. Most of the cultivated land is planted to wheat and other grains. At every stopping place a portion of the platform at the end of the station house is surrendered to vegetable sellers, usually old women, who have onions, lettuce, radishes, and other garden truck piled up on little trays around them and seemed to be doing a good business. Boys peddled baskets of strawberries under the windows of the cars—and they were swindles, of course. When we had eaten off a couple of layers we found nothing but leaves. They offered us cherries in attractive form, the stems of the fruit ingeniously inserted through slits in a stick, making long red wands, some of them three feet long. There are refreshment stands at every station, at which tea, sausages, sandwiches, bread, cheese, and other edibles are offered, and the train makes long stops so that the passengers have time to drink a cup of tea or a glass of vodka and to exercise on the platform. At every station tanks of cold water and samovars of hot water are provided free for third-class passengers, who can help themselves and make their own tea, as most of them do.
The running time was very slow with the long stops, and it took us thirteen hours to make 228 miles.
CHAPTER V
THE CITY OF TIFLIS
The Right Honourable James Bryce, British Ambassador to Washington, who visited Tiflis thirty-five years ago or more, on his way to climb Mount Ararat, described that city as “a human melting pot, a city of contrasts and mixtures, into which elements have been poured from half Europe and Asia and in which they as yet show no signs of combining. The most interesting thing about it,” he said, “is the city itself, the strange mixture of so many races, tongues, religions, customs. Its character lies in the fact that it has no character, but ever so many different ones. Here all these people live side by side, buying and selling and working for hire, yet never coming into any closer union, remaining indifferent to one another, with neither love nor hate nor ambition, peaceably obeying a government of strangers who conquered them without resistance and retains them without effort, and held together by no bond but its existence. Of national life or numerical life there is not the first faint glimmer; indeed, the aboriginal people of the country seem scarcely less strangers in its streets than do all the other races that tread them.”
There are said to be seventy different languages spoken on the streets of Tiflis, or at least so many dialects of the various races of Europe and Asia who have been attracted there by business and other interests and in search of employment. Many of the dialects belong to the same parent language; many of the races sprang from the same stock, but each has acquired a certain individuality by reason of its environment and the conditions under which it has been living. As Mr. Bryce says: “Probably nowhere else in all the world can so great a variety of stocks, languages, and religions be found huddled together in so narrow an area. All these races live together, not merely within the limits of the same country, a country politically and physically one, but to a great extent actually on the same soil, mixed up with and crossing one another. In one part Georgians, in another Armenians, in a third Tartars, predominate, but there are large districts where Armenians and Georgians; or Armenians, Georgians, and Tartars; or Tartars and Persians; or Persians, Tartars, and Armenians, are so equally represented in point of numbers that it is difficult to say which element predominates. This phenomenon is strange to one who knows only the homogeneous population of west European countries, or of a country like America, where all sorts of elements are day by day being flung into their melting pot and lose their identity almost at once.”
What Mr. Bryce wrote thirty-five years ago of Tiflis is equally true to-day. Perhaps it is even more true than it was then because of the increase of population. Tiflis is twice as large by the census of 1905 as it was in 1875, when he was here. Tiflis already has two hundred thousand population, and is growing rapidly. A bird’s-eye view of this curious old town can be obtained by taking a funicular, or inclined plane, railway to the top of a bluff, where there are a restaurant, tea houses, a merry-go-round, and other simple amusements which are much patronized by the working classes. Standing upon a platform, you can take in the whole panorama. The different sections of the town can be pointed out to you—the Russian, German, Georgian, Persian, Armenian, and Tartar quarters, with the brown river dividing them and the roofs painted in different colours.