384 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



splendid, good-tempered, fair giant. Fair men with tawny heads 

 are common. The third was a tattered, dark, stumpy, noisy bar- 

 barian. The costumes and manners of the women are various. 



After its natural beauties, its jDeaks and forests, what strikes 

 the traveler in Suanetia is the local architecture. The castellated 

 villages which lawlessness has produced are as prominent in his 

 eyes as the castles of the robber barons are to the Rhine tourist, 

 or the towers of San Gemignano to those who wander in Italian 

 by-ways. Nothing more strangely fantastic can be imagined than 

 these towered hamlets. Mestia alone has seventy towers, from 

 forty to eighty feet high, Ushkul about fifty, and two castles be- 

 sides. Let me try to describe, from a sketch, a street scene in 

 Chubiani, one of the hamlets of Ushkul, seven thousand feet 

 above the sea. The house is a square block, built of irregular 

 pieces of slate and slate-roofed. The only windows are small 

 holes, high uj), and unclosed. The smoke escapes through the 

 roof. Birch-bark torches are used at night. A wooden passage, 

 capable of being cut down in case of emergency, leads to the 

 tower of refuge. Let us enter the house : it consists of one large 

 ill-lighted room ; two or three rude stones form the hearth ; there 

 are a few rough wooden benches and stools on the earthen floor ; 

 in the corner is a raised wooden platform with skins and cushions, 

 the family couch. Groping up a dark passage, we reach the tower. 

 Ladders, easily removable, reach from story to story. The ladders 

 are short, and to gain each story one is compelled to scramble up 

 projecting stones left in the wall. Skulls of wild goats, and other 

 odds and ends, lie about on the landings. On the top story are 

 loop-holes for firing. These towers, unlike the churches, are built 

 of untrimmed black slates, generally whitewashed. At Ushkul, 

 however, there are two castles, one fifty the other five hundred 

 feet above the village (attributed, of course, to Queen Thamara), 

 in which the black slate has been left in its native color. In the 

 lower castle I found a ruined chapel. The higher castle com- 

 mands a view of the pass to the Upper Skenes Skali, and must 

 have been the defense of this entrance to the valley. M. Bus- 

 sanio Nichoradse, a native of Ushkul, and a schoolmaster, told 

 me that in ancient times all the families in a village were bound 

 to assist their neighbor who was building a tower, but that no 

 new towers had been raised, though many had been repaired, with- 

 in his memory. A somewhat similar custom existed in the pres- 

 ent generation at Chamounix. 



" Savage Suanetia," the title chosen by an enthusiastic sports- 

 man for the most recent description of this district, although 

 in one sense appropriate, seems to me, so far as nature is con- 

 cerned, singularly unhappy. Smiling, sylvan — such are the epi- 

 thets that come naturally to the traveler's lips as he suddenly 



