living in towns is enervating; it starves both gods and devils. there the half-gods of wit and conversation hold sway. one morning i put a sovereign in my pocket, slung my travelling bed over my shoulder, and resolved to see more of the mountains. the sovereign was in small change.
it was a dull, showery day, and the green trees clung to the mountain sides like soft plumage. i walked the whole day along the georgian road and met no more than two people beyond the little crowd packed into the stage-coach. in the afternoon i entered the débris of larse, where the famous road enters the great mountains, and i slept in the post-station within sight of the great ermolovsky stone, famous for its size, and for a russian poem which it inspired.
next morning i felt that my journey had begun. for i was at the mouth of the dariel gorge. two versts from the station was the little red bridge which clasps together the great rocks on either bank of the terek. they call it, as was, i suppose, almost inevitable, 164the devil’s bridge, and it looks enchanted. it is overhung by gigantic cliffs, the great walls of the corridor of the gorge. the river which rushes underneath is something incomparably stronger than the bridge itself; it is a monster wallowing, plunging, roaring, thundering, lifting up a hundred dirty heads. no horse or man would stand a chance in its current; even the great glacial boulders, weighing tons, are rolled over and over by its waves, and, shutting one’s eyes, one listens to an uproar as of the heaviest streetful of traffic on cheapside.
i think may is the best time to see the gorge, of a morning at dawn. i was there before the sun had risen. it was then indeed what a russian has called it, “a fairy tale in twelve versts.” there is little verdure there except the grass, but the tops of the cliffs are snow-crested, and just below the snow one sees, far away, the hoar-frosted tops of woods. below that are two or three thousand feet of rock, brown with withered grass, but brightened here and there by the greenest fir trees. at the base the tortured rock seems wrought in cyphers and frescoes, all twisted and lined as if a great history had been told in hieroglyphics and letters that only some past civilisation had been able to understand. but, as someone has said, “odin has engraved runes upon all visible things—a divine alphabet intelligible only to the thinking spirit.”
the cliffs are crowned here and there by the ruins of 165old towers, and the castle of queen tamara still stands, a grim survival from the twelfth century when many crimes were accomplished there. one still sees the stairway in the rock along which unfortunate victims used to be taken to be hurled into the foaming river. even below the ruins the clefts hold snow, and one sees a rivulet of snow and ice descending to become a cascade of bright water. from the river to the sky the whole is harmonised by moss and lichen and ancient greyness. it is a place where the stupendous majesty of nature troubles the soul, where one feels oppressed by the immanence of powers greater than oneself, where one knows in one’s heart how small and feeble is the little earth-born creature man beside those powers which have fashioned the universe and which move in the fir-hearts of worlds.
i sat on a stone and looked up. the perfectly blue sky was spread across like a roof. the sun had risen, but would not shine in upon me for hours. meanwhile i watched the light descending from the mountains, and the sharp shadow picture of the rocks on my side thrown on the rocks of the other. the shadow was gradually climbing down.
how clearly all sounds can be distinguished there! the rocks preserve even the whisper. i notice that when one comes out of the open into the shelter of a gorge all sounds are trebled in volume and in distinctness. one becomes aware of the music of the wind, 166the roar of the distant torrent; even the little rivulets trickling down from the snow-drifts have a voice that reaches the ear. the waterfalls have two voices, the first a roar, and the second which the listener hears as a secret treble.
i walked on uphill past the boundary line into trans-caucasia, past the government fort and the first free wine-inn of the new territory—the russians have allowed the vodka monopoly to lapse in trans-caucasia—and came to the devdorak glacier with its long file of snow and ice. here there was a large pile of snow on the road, hard, firm snow six feet deep. it had dropped from the heights. i walked on top of it, and it was so hard that i did not even make foot-prints. a man would stand a bad chance against a falling drift.
at devdorak is the alexandrovsky bridge, and i crossed the terek once more and came to the sunny side of the gorge. a hot sun shone and a bracing wind rushed round the corners of the serpentine road. butterflies purple and brown disported themselves, and where the water oozed through the porphyry the rocks were festooned with flowers.
