station for fresh horses; and in less than an hour we are rattling on again as if nothing had happened. For the next hour we wind through the depths of a tremendous ravine, shut in by precipices many hundred feet in height, and swept by a foaming torrent, into which we have to dash every now and then; for here the "road" exists only in name, consisting merely of what little clear ground landslips from above, and floods from below, have been pleased to spare us. But by degrees the great walls become lower and less steep, the narrow ravine opens out wider and wider, the path grows clearer and more level, till at length, towards afternoon, we come out upon the vast green plain on the border of which lies Vladikavkaz-a neat little town, with the straight, wide streets, and painted churchtowers, and many-coloured houses, which characterise every Russian town from the White Sea to the Black. But even here there is no rest for us. One hasty douche of soap and water, a dinner "against time," and we are on the road again. And then, for hours together, the vast, green, silent steppe, with here and there a Cossack hut, or a quaint little post-house with its black and white door posts—at first all ablaze with hot, cloudless sunshine, then blurred into night, then awakened by the rising moon to a ghostly resurrection. And all night long we scurry through a phantasmagoria of broken roads and pebbly streams, and horses yoked and unyoked, and bearded faces in fitful lantern light, and stalwart Cossacks brawling over their liquor, and lonely stretches of dark prairie, lifeless and voiceless as the grave. And then the sun rises, and the long, burning, monotonous day goes slowly on-the same loneliness, the same dust, the same heat, the same unending level— broken only by a hasty gorge of half raw meat at Khasaf-iourt, the scene of one of Dumas père's splendid impossibilities. Night comes round once more, and again we plunge into the mountains, and toil through them all night long-up and down steep inclines, over crunching beds of gravel, through plashing fords, along black tomb-like gorges-till at length, just as morning breaks, a glittering streak along the eastern horizon announces the presence of the Caspian Sea. An hour later, we are in Petrovsk-the one tolerable port on the western shore of the Caspian, whence the colony of Krasnovodsk in 1869, and the supplies of the Mangishlak column a month ago,* made their first start. It is a queer little straggling town, crowned by the usual miniature fort, with the usual handful of men playing soldiers inside. But if the sea be here, the steamer is not; for his Majesty the Shah has just been graciously pleased to go northward in four or five steamers at once, leaving none for the common herd; so that, for four days to come, I have nothing to do but to watch the soldiers fishing off the breakwater, and to bathe morning and evening in the clear, cool, slightly * The transport steamer from Kinderli Bay (the starting-point of the Mangishlak column) returned to Petrovsk the day after my arrival. brackish water-trying vainly, meanwhile, to pick up any news worth sending home. At length, on the fifth morning (or, as it seems to me, about midnight), I am aroused by a gruff voice telling me that "the steamer's in, and no time to lose;" and within an hour we are under full steam for Astrakhan. Near The panorama of the deck is much the same as that already described on the Black Sea, with a larger admixture of high-cheeked Persian faces, half-buried in huge conical caps of black sheepskin, which look very much like tarred beehives. But there is one group which has a sad and sinister picturesqueness. the stern, a little apart from the rest, sit four stalwart and rather handsome young men, in high Cossack caps and white tunics, laughing loudly over a native game of cards, in which they seem to be getting rather the better of the four weather-beaten soldiers who are their antagonists. But whenever they move, you hear an ominous clanking, and, looking closer, espy huge rings of steel clutching both ancles, linked together by a heavy chain. They are convicts on their way to Siberia; and these friendly soldiers, who are laughing and joking with them, form their appointed guard. At some unearthly hour on the following morning, we reach "lighthouse No. 4," and are shifted en masse into a huge coffin-shaped barge, suggestive of Charon's boat on a grand scale-an idea amply borne out by the fitful lamp light, the hurrying swarm of shadowy figures, and the surrounding waste of dim silent waters. The operation of towing us up the estuary is necessarily a slow one, and we have leisure to drink in all the nauseous details of the panorama. Leaden sky, leaden sea; here and there a vast, clumsy landing-stage moored in mid-channel, or a long, low patch of mudbank, with two or three log huts settled on it like flies, stretching along the thick, greasy stream; and everywhere a quiet, overpowering filthiness, characteristic of the place where Father Volga shakes the dust from his feet after countless miles of weary travel, before sinking to rest for ever. Little by little, however, the scenery becomes less atrociously Mississipian, though still preserving its overwhelming desolation. Wide sweeps of barren sand -bristling reeds in rank luxuriance, alive with clamorous wild-fowl-projecting headlands, crowned with log-built hamlets-long ranges of dried fish, hanging in the sun like the tails of Bopeep's flock-little clusters of Kalmuck tents, like hives minus the industry—and, every here and there, a rudely-shaped cross, marking the spot where, between the lonely river and the infinite desert, one more unknown toiler has gone home to rest. At length, in the glory of the summer sunset, the white towers of a huge massive cathedral, and the tall spires, serried roofs, and bristling masts of a great seaport, rise along the sky; and Astrakhan, the gate of Asiatic commerce, the mart of Ivan the Terrible, the centre of a great traffic in days when Liverpool and New York were unthought of, is before us in all its fulness. But the great city itself cannot be described here. A C volume would hardly do justice to its quaint, old-world picturesqueness-its massive citadel, and narrow streets, and bare, dusty boulevards, and motley population. Leisure enough have I to inspect it during the twentyfour hours that I wait in vain for the starting of the "up" steamer; but (as third-rate historians say when they wish to be impressive) "the time was coming and it came." |