94 CASUALS IN THE CAUCASUS 



cleft in the range of mountain giants around us. 

 Creaking arbas, the native two-wheeled carts of 

 Georgia, prehistoric as Boadicea's chariot, passed us 

 with scarce an inch to spare. The primitive vehicles 

 are made entirely of wood, even the nails are pegs, 

 and the groans of the heavy-moving contraptions 

 announce their approach from a long way off. Four 

 lumbering oxen dragged each load of swollen skins, 

 filled with wine from the Kakheti valley. 



Set in the face of the scarped precipice above us 

 were tiers of the black-mouthed caverns so often come 

 upon in Georgia, the troglodyte homes of Strabo's 

 describing. One historian puts forward the idea that 

 these man-made caves, often inaccessible save by rope 

 from the heights above, are in reality ancient places 

 of sepulture ; another antiquarian submits that the 

 constructed fastnesses have never had any purpose 

 save that of providing impregnable strongholds, which 

 have been used again and again from prehistoric times. 

 The little openings, here cut out from the solid rock, 

 are arranged in lines, in varying numbers, tier on tier, 

 never less than three in a row, sometimes many 

 more. 



To the unarchseological mind it does not seem very 

 likely that anyone, even with the knack of construction 

 peculiar to the ancients, would have prepared such 

 intensely awkward-to-get-at tombs, and no evidence 

 is forthcoming to support the theory. Numerous burial 

 places of the Stone and Bronze Age have been dis- 

 covered all over the Caucasus, but the cliff refuges 

 seem what they seem, invincible homes for warlike 



