My route lay through Kursk and Kharkov, but I turned off onto the direct road to Tiflis, sacrificing a good dinner in a Kursk inn (no trifling thing in our travels) and not curious to visit Kharkov University, which could not match a meal in Kursk.
The roads as far as Elets are terrible. My carriage sank several times into mud worthy of the mud of Odessa. Sometimes I managed to make no more than thirty miles in a day. Finally I saw the steppes of Voronezh and rolled on freely over the green plain. In Novocherkassk I found Count Pushkin, who was also going to Tiflis, and we agreed to travel together.14
The transition from Europe to Asia is felt more and more by the hour: forests disappear, hills smooth out, grass becomes thicker and shows more vegetative force; birds unknown in our forests appear; eagles sit like sentinels on the mounds that mark the high road and gaze proudly at the travelers; over the fertile pastures
Indomitable mares
Proudly stray in herds.15
Kalmyks settle around the station huts. Near their kibitkas graze their ugly, shaggy horses, known to you from the fine drawings of Orlovsky.16
The other day I visited a Kalmyk kibitka (crisscross wattle, covered with white felt). The whole family was preparing to have lunch. In the center a cauldron was boiling, and the smoke went out through an opening in the top of the kibitka. A young Kalmyk girl, not bad-looking at all, was sewing and smoking a pipe. I sat down beside her. “What’s your name?”—“* * *”—“How old are you?”—“Ten and eight.”—“What are you sewing?”—“Pant.”—“For whom?”—“For self.” She handed me her pipe and started on lunch. In the cauldron tea was boiling with mutton fat and salt. She offered me her dipper. I did not want to refuse and took a sip, trying to hold my breath. I do not think any other national cuisine could produce anything more vile. I asked for something to follow it up. They gave me a piece of dried mare’s meat; I was glad enough of that. Kalmyk coquetry scared me; I hastily got out of the kibitka and rode away from the Circe of the steppe.
—
In Stavropol I saw clouds on the edge of the sky that had struck my eyes exactly nine years earlier. They were still the same, still in the same place. These were the snowy peaks of the Caucasian mountain range.
From Georgievsk I went to see Hot Springs.17 There I found great changes: in my time the baths were in huts hastily slapped together. The springs, most of them in their primitive state, spurted, steamed, and poured down the mountain in all directions, leaving white or reddish traces behind them. We scooped up the seething water with a dipper made of bark, or with the bottom of a broken bottle. Now magnificent baths and houses have been built. A boulevard lined with lindens follows around the slope of Mashuk. Everywhere there are clean paths, green benches, regular flowerbeds, bridges, pavilions. The sources have been fitted out and lined with stone; police notices are tacked to the walls of the baths; everywhere there is order, cleanliness, prettiness…
I confess: The Caucasian springs now offer more conveniences; but I regretted their former wild state; I regretted the steep, stony paths, the bushes, and the unfenced precipices over which I once clambered. With sadness I left the springs and made my way back to Georgievsk. Night soon fell. The clear sky was strewn with millions of stars. I rode along the bank of the Podkumok. A. Raevsky18 used to sit there with me, listening to the melody of the waters. The outline of majestic Beshtau grew blacker and blacker in the distance, surrounded by its vassal mountains, and finally disappeared in the darkness…
The next day we went further on and arrived in Ekaterinograd, formerly the seat of the governor-general.
In Ekaterinograd the Georgian military highway begins; the post road ends. You hire horses to Vladikavkaz. You are provided with a convoy of Cossacks, foot soldiers, and one cannon. Mail is sent twice a week and travelers join it: this is known as an “occasion.” We did not have long to wait. The mail came the next day, and the morning after, at nine o’clock, we were ready to be on our way. At the assembly place a whole caravan gathered, consisting of somewhere around five hundred people. There was a drum roll. We set off. At the head went the cannon, surrounded by foot soldiers. After it stretched carriages, britzkas, kibitkas for the soldiers’ wives, who traveled from one fortress to another; behind them creaked a train of two-wheeled arbas.*4 Alongside them ran herds of horses and oxen. Next to them galloped Nogai guides in burkas and with lassoes. All this pleased me very much at first, but I soon became bored. The cannon went at a walk, the match smoked and the soldiers lit their pipes from it. The slowness of our march (on the first day we made only ten miles), the insufferable heat, the shortage of supplies, the uncomfortable night stops, and finally the constant creaking of the Nogai arbas drove me out of all patience. The Tatars take pride in this creaking, saying that they drive around like honest people who have no need to hide. This time I would have found it more pleasant to travel in less respectable company. The road is rather monotonous: a plain; hills off to the sides. At the edge of the sky—the peaks of the Caucasus, getting higher and higher each day. Fortresses sufficient for these parts, with moats that any of us could have jumped across in the old days without a running start, with rusty cannon that have not been fired since the time of Count Gudovich,19 with dilapidated ramparts where a garrison of chickens and geese wanders about. Within the fortress several hovels, where you can obtain with difficulty a dozen eggs and some sour milk.
The first noteworthy place is the fortress of Minaret. Approaching it, our caravan went along a lovely valley, between burial mounds overgrown with lindens and plane trees. These are the graves of several thousands who died from the plague. Gay with flowers sprung from the infected ashes. To the right shone the snowy Caucasus; ahead loomed an enormous tree-clad mountain; beyond it lay the fortress. Around it can be seen the traces of a devastated aul called Tatartub, which was once the main village in Great Kabarda. A slight, solitary minaret testifies to the existence of the vanished settlement. It rises slenderly amidst the heaps of stones on the bank of a dried-up stream. The inner stairway had not yet collapsed. I climbed up it to the platform, from which the mullah’s voice is no longer heard. There I found several unknown names scratched into the bricks by fame-loving travelers.