126 CASUALS IN THE CAUCASUS 



Yakimo had arrived — directed to us by the faithful 

 shepherd of the evening before, and when I saw the 

 lost one I hadn't the heart to upbraid him, he was 

 so wet and forlorn, having been at large all night. 

 Some natives would have had the sense to erect one 

 of the tents and creep into it, but of such people 

 clearly Yakimo was not one. 



Elizabeth Lazenby provided breakfast. Why, I 

 wonder, is there no statue to Elizabeth ? There are 

 memorials of so many less beneficent persons. 



Then we mounted our ponies again, and set forth, 

 keeping Yakimo well in sight this time, over boulders 

 big as coal-boxes, through continuous dark defiles 

 where the sun's rays never penetrated and a species 

 of damp, tentacled fungi covered the rocks, frieze- 

 like, over our heads. 



Game was non est as yet. No signs of their passing 

 met our eyes, and we searched each corrie with the 

 telescope. 



A good-sized tomb, piled with high stones, had some 

 broken horns of tur and chamois laid upon the apex, 

 offerings, I suppose, to some well-graced hunter. Two 

 black vipers, sunning themselves, flickered into safety 

 beneath the weather-worn skulls. Farther on we saw 

 a pale grey scorpion, whose sting, our servant told us, 

 is about as bad as that of a horse-fly, whilst that of the 

 black viper endangers life. 



We followed a glacier stream, milky white, for some 

 way, until it tumbled over a precipice and eluded us. 

 By lying flat on a rock at its edge we could see in a deep 

 hollow far, far below a village of little square houses, 



