Novels, Tales, Journeys полностью

Before we reached Lars, I lagged behind the convoy, unable to tear my eyes from the enormous cliffs between which the Terek gushes with indescribable fury. Suddenly a soldier comes running towards me, shouting from far off: “Don’t stop, Your Honor, they’ll kill you!” This warning, unaccustomed as I was, seemed extremely odd to me. The thing was that Ossetian bandits, safe in this narrow spot, shoot at travelers across the Terek. On the eve of our march they made such an attack on General Bekovich,24 who galloped through their gunfire. Visible on a cliff are the ruins of some citadel: they are stuck all over with the saklias of peaceful Ossetes, as with swallows’ nests.

We stopped for the night in Lars. Here we found a French traveler, who frightened us about the road ahead. He advised us to abandon the carriages in Kobi and continue on horseback. With him for the first time we drank Kakheti wine from a stinking wineskin, reminiscent of the feasting in the Iliad:

And in goatskins wine, our great delight!25

Here I found a soiled copy of The Prisoner of the Caucasus,26 and, I confess, I reread it with great pleasure. It is all weak, youthful, incomplete; but much of it is aptly divined and expressed.

The next morning we went on our way. Turkish prisoners were working on the road. They complained about the food they were given. They could never get used to Russian black bread. That reminded me of the words of my friend Sheremetev on his return from Paris: “Life in Paris is bad, brother: nothing to eat; no black bread for the asking!”

Five miles from Lars is the Darial outpost. The gorge bears the same name. The cliffs on both sides stand like parallel walls. Here it is so narrow, so narrow, one traveler writes, that you not only see but seem to feel the closeness.27 A scrap of sky like a ribbon shows blue over your head. Rivulets, falling down from the mountainous heights in small and splashing streams, reminded me of Rembrandt’s strange painting, The Rape of Ganymede.28 Besides that, the gorge is lighted perfectly in his taste. In some places the Terek washes right at the foot of the cliffs, and stones are piled along the road in the guise of a dam. Not far from the outpost, a little bridge is boldly thrown across the river. You stand on it as if on a mill. The little bridge shakes all over, and the Terek rumbles like the wheels that turn the millstone. Across from Darial on a steep cliff you can see the ruins of a fortress. Legend has it that a certain Queen Daria hid there, giving her name to the gorge: a tall tale. “Darial” in old Persian means “gate.” By Pliny’s testimony, the Caucasian Gate, which he mistakenly calls Caspian, was here.29 The gorge had a real gate across it, a wooden one, bound with iron. Under it, writes Pliny, flows the river Diriodoris. Here a fortress was erected to hold off the raids of the wild tribes, and so on. See the journey of Count J. Potocki, whose learned researches are as entertaining as his Spanish novels.30

From Darial we set out for Kazbek. We saw the Trinity Gate (an arch formed in the cliff by an explosion of powder)—a road used to pass under it, but now the Terek, which often changes its bed, flows there.

Not far from the settlement of Kazbek, we crossed the Furious Gully, a ravine which, during heavy rains, turns into a raging torrent. This time it was perfectly dry and roared in name only.

The village of Kazbek is located at the foot of Mount Kazbek and belongs to Prince Kazbek. The prince, a man of about forty-five, is taller than the fugelman of the Preobrazhensky regiment.31 We found him in the dukhan (the Georgian word for eateries, which are much poorer and no cleaner than Russian ones). In the doorway lay a fat-bellied burdyuk (an oxhide wineskin), spreading its four legs. The giant was sipping chikhir from it, and he asked me several questions, which I answered with a deference suited to his title and size. We parted great friends.

Impressions soon grow dull. Barely twenty-four hours went by, and already the roaring of the Terek and its shapeless waterfalls, already the cliffs and precipices, ceased to draw my attention. I was possessed only by impatience to reach Tiflis. I rode past Kazbek as indifferently as I once sailed past Chatyrdag. It is also true that the rainy and foggy weather prevented me from seeing its snowy heap, which, in a poet’s expression, “props up the heavenly vault.”32