In a Strange Land

by Algernon Blackwood

The best way to the héart of the Caucasus is via Tiflis, capital of Georgia, and the train from Batoum takes thirteen hours, though the distance is only a fraction over 300 versts. But one is grateful for the slowness of the journey, and thanks the driver of the two naphtha-burning engines for lingering at every one of the numerous stations along the old Colchian shore. Behind one the mountains of Armenia dip their blue sides in the yet bluer sea, and in front the soft outlines of the wooded Abkhasian shore, flanked by Mingrelia on the east, carry the eye with vast leaps up to that snowy, foam-like mass of white, where Eibruz is just visible in the sky, gigantic and remote.

And if one makes the journey on a Sunday, as I did, there is the additional attraction that the natives crowd to every station in ihe full glory of their wonderful costumes, and you survey some of the most ancient tribes of the world (according to the German authorities the Georgians are older than the Egyptians) while you sit at your carriage-window smoking the long, thin Russian cigarette. Not even Cook could arrange a better or more thorough review of the population than this.

The luxuriance of the vegetation along the fifty miles of shore leaves one rather bewildered, for in this moist and heated brilliance it is almost tropical, and of a rich prodigality almost oppressive. The wild confusion of box, azalea, rhododendron, fig, eucalyptus, almond, jasmine, aloes, huge chestnuts, and acacia, choked with vines and flowering creepers, rising out of a sea of giant bracken and utterly smothered in wild roses, leaves upon the mind a vague sense of a world suffocated under too many leaves, and not even the vile stench of the oil from the engine can prevent a hundred strangely mingled perfumes from flooding the air of the carriage.

Across the plain, too, as the train turns away from the sea and runs eastwards alongside the river Phasis (now Rion), the rich nature of this amazingly fertile soil is everywhere obvious⁠—as also the inherent laziness of those Georgians who loathe work and scarcely trouble to pick the fruit or help the earth produce it, “Lazy as a Grusian” is the word here⁠—Grusian beiug a collective term for the Georgian, Mingrelian, Iberian, and Gourian tribes in general. Being lazy, too fond of this good Kakhetian wine, and easily provided for by the soil, they are at the same time very, very poor.

The memory of the journey remains in one’s mind as a rather violently brilliant kaleidoscope, haunted persistently by the shades of Medea and Jason; of the Fleece glimmering there among the densely festooned woods of beech, more yellow than those flags that the hot wind sets a-shiver in thousands along every stream, or by yet dimmer visions than Shelley saw winging their way to the realm of Demogorgon in that “Caucasian Vale” where Asia, Panthea, and Ione talked such sweet music when the world was young. The proper way to view the land, one feels, would be as Phryxus did from the back of that flying ram⁠—or its modern equivalent, the aeroplane. The mind and imagination become sorely overcharged and weighted; yet before these first suggestions can be arranged and shifted come others pushing urgently behind⁠—that the Georgians are the “Lost Tribes,” and these “Mountain Jews” who throng the modern stations with their splendid, inscrutable visages had a King who traced his genealogy back to David; that this engine burning Baku oil is puffing its way somewhat in the direction of the fairest of all Gardens of the Imagination, that garden of great rivers, where Eve and Adam played; and that not very far south of Tiflis towers the 12,000 feet of snowy Ararat out of the Armenian plain!

Moreover, before we reached Tiflis under the stars we had passed Mtzkhet, ancient capital of Georgia, the treasure of whose cathedral is the robe of Jesus Christ (Argenteuil and Treves have the tunics only) and the bones of St. Joseph! The scholar or student, doubtless, with facts all neatly labelled and docketed, might have had no trouble with the surging suggestions that swamped an untutored mind, but I know, at any rate, it was a relief to focus the brain on some simple common object⁠—such, for instance, as the charming little Georgian children, in rags and bare-footed, who crowded the platforms like bright eyed, nimble-footed elves, and offered mountain strawberries, cherries thickly stuck on waving reds a yard long, and handfuls of wild asparagus at something less than a farthing for more than one could eat.

How they ran in and out among the flowing black and brown bourkas and the tcherkeskas of all colors of the big bearded mountaineers, huge daggers stuck in their belts, mitre-likc bashliks at the back of their heads, high soft-leather boots, often charmingly “patterned,” and cartridge-cases of ivory, bone, ebony, or silver, strung at an angle across their big chests!

Very practical some of the arrangements of this Caucasian train⁠—some, not all, for in a first-class carriage the only light was a fag-end of a candle that barely enabled one to tell the time when standing up! At the larger (!) stations the buffets are excellent, and time is ample to prove it. Hot bortsch, omelettes, various steaming meats, and delicious tea, cheese, and cakes, prices plainly marked, stood all ready on a counter. You helped yourself, carried your plate to a table, and were happy. A bell rings three times by way of warning⁠—one stroke first, a few minutes late two strokes, about five minutes afterwards three strokes, and then the train moves out.

Moreover, the guard, in whose Mingrelian breast my Russian phrase book and my struggles with the names of the stations stirred pity and amusement, lent me his timetable, giving time of arrival and departure at every little station, with the exact number of minutes the train stopped there, Nor shall I ever forget the kindness of another Georgian, whom I discovered in the third-class as I walked through, who suddenly addressed me in French. Six feet high, bearded, his tcherkeska a perfect armory of weapons, his long nose suggesting something more than Semitic sympathy, he strode up and informed me that he had once been guide, interpreter, and friend for an Englishman (Lord Somebody, whose name I never discovered, for he pronounced it like a sneeze) in Daghestan, but who knew no French. (“And why was that?” he asked, “when France is at the door of London?”)

This warrior, without molesting me in any way, insisted on steering me through the bewilderment of Tiflis station, finding cab and luggage, telling me exactly what to pay porter and coachman, and then strode off and disappeared in the darkness with the bow of an ambassador and a gentle haughtiness that made a tip an impossible offence.

Towards midday the train passes the watershed between the Rion and the Koura rivers, and at Sowram enters Georgia proper, leaves behind the wooded mountains of Imerethia, aud follows the latter river through a treeless but beautiful valley, down to Tifils. At one of the last little stations, before the forests were gone, however, there entered the train one of the tribe of Georgian mountain Jews, his hands full of handkerchiefs and little shawls of the most delicate colored silk imaginable. It was like foam⁠—light as the cigarette smoke he puffed incessantly. He was a born and most persistent salesman, and had ever new arrangements and groupings of his various articles to tempt one, all handmade in his native village.

He gave the guard half a rouble to be left in peace, and my travelling companion, a German of Baku, just back from the “hugely exaggerated Malkop oilfields,” acted as interpreter as well as victim. For 1½ roubles (3s.) I became owner of an assortment of “silk goods” I could have got nowhere else under four times the amount, and for which he had first suggested 10 roubles, or £1 1s. And this splendid-faced old man, a figure from little pictures of one’s childhood days, was presumably a member of the Lost tribes, and, according to Lehmann, Belk, and others, of a people older than the Egyptians.

By the time the train reaches Tiflis most of these bashlik’d and be-daggered fellows have got out, en route for their mountain villages, and only the few European travellers, mostly en route for Bakon (another seventeen hours) remain, with a handful of Armenians and Persians bound for their respective quarters in the town. The Koura, still little more than a torrent, races through the town that lies in its cup-like depression among arid hills. It looks its best arriving by night from the train, for it is difficult to tell where its twinkling lights end and the stars begin. In the glare of day one sees with dismay that it has its modern quarter (ugly as any other Russian town of straight streets), its tramcars, its funiculaire, and⁠—six miles for roller-skating!