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 ne