32 CASUALS IN THE CAUCASUS 



are made. He dislikes a forested country, and prefers 

 his land, an he could choose, of pancake flatness. 

 Homesteads, therefore, in the fair territory are few, 

 roads poor, posts, on the maps, many, but — that is 

 all. A few big estates were parcelled out to Russian 

 nobles, and here and there an enterprising Greek has 

 cleared the land for tobacco. For the rest, a desolation 

 that can be felt as with a touch, a loneliness which 

 ripples in the murmur of the streams, a requiem in the 

 sigh of the wind as it sweeps from the snow-fields 

 across the lands of a nation passed to nothingness. 



Abkhasia, with its dangerous rocky coast-line and 

 forbidding cliffs, loomed next on our line of vision, and 

 the low siren song of the caves came out and gave us 

 greeting. Great gaunt crags overhung the gloomy 

 water, and up the boulders the waves broke stormily. 

 The frowning wall gave no hint of the rivers, and pine 

 forests, canyons, and glens and valleys tucked away 

 in the interior, or of the wonderful pasture lands 

 celebrated throughout the Caucasus. 



The story of the Abkhas is, to a certain extent, that 

 of the neighbouring tribe, save that whilst many 

 joined in the disastrous exodus to Turkey large num- 

 bers submitted to Russia, They are a graft on the 

 Circassian type, just as courageous, just as reckless, 

 deep as their own cavernous caves, lawless as the sea 

 at their gates. 



Palgrave, in his Eastern Studies, says : " Of the 

 early history of the Abkhasian race little is known, 

 and little is probably to be known. More than two 

 thousand years ago we find them in Greek records 



