the ut. ek ON THE ROAD TO KHIVA. CHAPTER I. FROM THE CRIMEA TO THE CAUCASUS. Опр age is an age of progress, and travelling has ed in common with everything else. Our sober gidfathers, who spent three or four years over the Gand Tour, and thought even a trip to Paris an achievement worth talking about, would be thunderstruck at the way in which their descendants dart from Mecca to Mexico, from Sydney to Spitzbergen, from Greenland's icy mountains to India's coral strand, and back again. The time is at hand when the dead walls of London shall flame with advertisements of "Twenty-Five Minutes in the Brazils," by the Author of "Through Africa in Half-an-Hour." In the stupid old days, a man spent half his life in one country, and then confessed frankly that he knew little or nothing about it. We, more enlightened, traverse a whole empire in three months at the heels of an interpreter and a valet-de-place, and then write a full account of its politics, literature, history, jurisprudence, and general condition, including many interesting facts hitherto unknown to the natives themselves. Nil mortalibus A arduum est. British climbers have carved their names on the summit of Ararat, and British beefsteaks have ousted human flesh from the restaurants of Fiji; and who can tell whether the next generation may not see M. de Lesseps projecting a railway to the sun with a branch line to Mercury, or Mr Stanley gracefully doffing his hat on the summit of a lunar volcano, with a polite, "The Man in the Moon, I presume?" Somewhat after this fashion do I moralise as the Crimean hills melt into the western sky, and the hitherto unknown Caucasus rises before me in all its splendour. For the first time since I set my face toward Khiva three weeks ago,* I am about to break new ground. On the route from London to St Petersburg, and from St Petersburg to the Black Sea, I am already, to my cost, as great an authority as the Koran of Albemarle Street. I have seen, often enough to be heartily sick of them, the tall, scraggy, coffee - pot churches, and "statues long after the antique," of hot, dusty, cosmopolitan Odessa. I have surveyed the little cluster of white houses which the Czar Nicholas cursed with his last breath as "shameful Eupatoria," and have seen the dark ridge up which Codrington's stormers went bravely into the jaws of death, looming gauntly against the lustrous sky. I have sat on the smooth green slope whence the little obelisk of stone that guards the dust of those who fell before the Redan, looks down upon ruined Sebastopol. I have seen the * March 8th, 1873. |