everything else Turkish, were late in coming, diseases broke out, and a large part of the Tcherkesses died before the embarkation took place. Of those who sailed, the majority were settled in Lazistan, or in Turkish Armenia, north of Erzerum. Of these last, some have been since transferred to Europe, and have played their part in the Bulgarian massacres of 1876. Others are now fighting the Russians, or rather taking the opportunity which the war gives them, of murdering the natives in Armenia. The fate of a nation driven from its ancestral seats cannot but move our sympathy. But there was nothing else in the character or history of the Circassians to justify that sympathy. Their supposed chivalry, like most chivalries, disappeared upon close examination. They lived upon robbery and the sale of their children, and of the ferocity which accompanies their robberies they have given us hideous examples in Bulgaria, and still more recently in the Armenian campaign.

The Tcherkess country is now for the most part uninhabited, though some few of the old inhabitants linger in the valleys or in the Russian towns of the steppe. Its lower parts, along the tributaries of the Kuban, are being colonized by the Russians, but the fevers that infest these wooded valleys have proved very fatal to the new-comers, and the inner hollows of the mountains remain abandoned to the wild bull, largest of European quadrupeds, who ranges unpursued through these vast solitudes. Last autumn all was quiet through the Caucasus from end to end, and a traveller with a couple of Cossacks was safe even among the

warlike Lesghians, many of whom have taken service. as irregular cavalry under the Russian flag.1 The only exception is to be found among the independent Suans before mentioned, who, singularly ill-conditioned fellows as they are, are nevertheless in some ways the most interesting of all the Caucasian races, having preserved many curious primitive customs and forms of ritual. They have resisted several attempts of the Russians to collect taxes from them, and one one of their villages was last summer in a state of armed resistance to the feebly led attacks of a detachment of troops sent against them. Being only some 10,000 in number, they will, of course, be reduced without difficulty as soon as a military road is made into their country, and all the more readily as they live in a state of perpetual feud with one another, village against village, and family against family. There is no political organization. Each man, like the Cyclopes in Homer, rules over his wife and children, and cares nothing for his neighbour.2

1 Since the above was written, an insurrection is reported to have broken out not only in Abhasia, where the Turks have landed, but among the Lesghians and Tchetchens in Daghestan. It is hard to make out what has really happened; but apparently the rising has not been important there, and will be easily suppressed. So long as the Dariel road is not threatened, Russia need not much care about Daghestan, whose tribes are too far from the Euxine to co-operate with the Turks. The Tcherkesses are all gone from Circassia, and the Abhasians are too fickle and cowardly to constitute any real danger. Indeed, the Turkish troops are now (July 1877) being withdrawn from their country altogether.

* For further details regarding these Suans, the curious reader may be referred to 'Central Caucasus' of Mr. Freshfield, whose party was almost the first in recent times to visit their country, and were exposed to some danger from them; to Captain Telfer's Crimea and Transcaucasia,' vol. ii. and appendix; and to a work by Dr. Radde, the eminent botanist, entitled 'Die drei Langenhochthaler Imeritiens.'

So far, therefore, as safety to life is concerned, the explorer of the Caucasus has little to fear. But of course there are absolutely no facilities for travelling such as we find in the Alps or even in the Carpathians, no inns, no roads, no guides, and in some regions no beasts of burden. Except that the risk of being eaten or pierced by poisoned arrows is gone, the mountains are much in the same state as they were in the time of Herodotus and Strabo. The Dariel military road, of which more anon, crosses the chain near its centre, and there is, as I have said, a network of roads in one part of Daghestan; otherwise nothing passable by wheels. Here and there a village or a shepherd's hut will shelter the traveller, but often he must depend upon his tent, and, like Virgil's Libyan herdsman, carry all that he wants with him, food, bedding, and weapons; and to do this, he needs a little army of porters, whom it is often troublesome enough

to manage.

There is only one part of the Caucasus that has been, as the French say, "utilised" for the purposes of tourists or pleasure seekers, and even that part is not in the Caucasus at all, but in the steppe at the foot of it. This is the mineral water region lying to the south-west of the town of Stavropol, and due north of Mount Elbruz or Minghi Tau,' the highest summit of the whole chain. Here four or five little

1

1 Minghi Tau (tau=dagh=mountain) is the true local name, the Tatar name, of this monarch of European mountains (it lies entirely in Europe, north of the watershed). Elbruz is said to be Persian, and is certainly the usual Persian name for the Caucasus and for a mountain chain in general; it is given to the lofty chain which runs round the south and south-east extremity of the Caspian.

bathing-places lie pretty near to one another, the chief of which, Pjätigorsk, is entitled to a few words of description.

To reach Pjätigorsk, one leaves the railway from Rostof to Vladikavkaz at a station called (by interpretation) Mineral Waters, a wooden erection planted right down in the middle of the desolate steppe, and finds some twenty two-horse droshkys drawn up outside, whose drivers are shouting, gesticulating, and jostling one another like so many Irish carmen. It is a long business making a bargain with one of them, for though there is plenty of competition, there is also a trade-union feeling that prices must be kept up in the common interest; and in Russia the driver is generally pretty resolute, and, though he asks at first a great deal more than he expects to get, can never be brought below the minimum he has originally resolved upon. Our experience was that, when the bargain has once been made, he will abide by it, and not try to spring fresh demands upon you. When at last a driver had got us, and embarked our baggage, he set off at full speed over what seemed to be the open steppe, though after a while we discovered from the wheel tracks on it that it was the regular and only road to the most frequented of all the wateringplaces in the Russian empire. Here, where the neighbouring mountains make the climate moister, the grass was pretty thick and not so utterly brown as farther north. Of flowers, the commonest is a species of Statice, growing in large patches, which light up the rolling steppe with a purple glow that

reminded one of the heather bloom on the moors of Scotland in August. Mounting gradually towards a gap in the group of limestone hills which here projects into the plain, and culminates in the bold peak of Beschtau, 7000 feet above the sea-level, we entered a low wood of beech and oak, the first we had seen since Voronej, 700 miles back, and, on emerging from it, to the south-west, saw Pjätigorsk at our feet, and the outer slopes of the Caucasus rising behind it. Alas! the southern sky was thick, and where the glittering snows of Elbruz and Dykhtau ought to have appeared, there were only clouds and darkness.

Pjätigorsk, which takes its name (Five Mountains) from the five summits of the picturesque mountain group just mentioned, has been resorted to for its sulphurous waters, which are drunk as well as bathed in, for nearly one hundred years. Its progress was slow so long as the Tcherkesses were accustomed to swoop down from the hills to the south-west and carry off the unlucky patients as prisoners. In those days Russian magnates came with a train of two or three hundred servants, and encamped by the springs for two months at a time. Afterwards a military post was established, to keep off the marauders, a bath-house was erected, and now, since the railway has come within three hours' drive, new streets are rising in all directions, and the number of visitors will no doubt increase rapidly. Far as the Caucasus is from St. Petersburg, the bathing-places of the Rhine or Bohemia are still farther, and as Southern Russia fills up, the population which forms the special clientèle of