VOYAGE AND ARRIVAL 39 



second dagger, longer still, hung from his side, sus- 

 pended from a beautifully wrought belt. Epaulettes 

 he wore also, stiff, solid-looking silver ones. 



A red dawn broke on a sparsely populated landscape, 

 with no agricultural areas of any magnitude. Some- 

 times in a really ugly vista a little peep of Paradise 

 vouchsafed itself, as though to encourage us. A 

 distant peak, a green copse, the wavering Kura River, 

 the gold of a sunflower field, or the lesser glint of maize. 

 Flocks of quail rose as the train disturbed them, gorged 

 Httle birds — so fat they could hardly fly at all — who 

 lolloped back into the Lucullus banquet in sated 

 heaviness. 



We climbed up the Suram mountain, the watershed 

 which divides the comparatively temperate zone of the 

 Rion River from that of the Kura, with its climatic 

 extremes, and down again, in an astonishing drop, to 

 Suram itself. In the early morning hours we reached 

 Gori, a little town lying on a plain at the base of a 

 rock, rising to a height of perhaps two hundred feet. 

 Here all the passengers, save ourselves and the Prince, 

 who breakfasted with us, stampeded to the refresh- 

 ment-room, or to waiting buffets on the platform, and 

 drank tea from little glasses set in a handled arrange- 

 ment, and ate lengthy cucumbers dipped in sugar, 

 inch by inch. Cucumbers at six o'clock in the 

 morning ! 



From Gori the line wound through miles of glens, 

 narrowing in places to the very windows of the train. 

 Thence from these green valleys, through rocky defiles 

 to a country cut by precipices, rolling far, far below 



