ItLACK SEA COAST. 71 



through tin; open doorway of a tent, you caught 

 the glare of a huge tire and your nostrils a savoury 

 smell of roasting mutton. Feeling hungry, 1 en- 

 tered at one of these open doors, and found myself 

 in a Kalmuck refreshment booth, with two or three 

 dead sheep hanging round the tent-pole and a big 

 semi-subterranean fire at the farther end. Here 

 several wild-looking Tartars were devilling little 

 knobs of mutton on a skewer ; and purchasing two 

 or three of these skewers, with their savoury burden 

 oil them all hissing from the eoals, we made the 

 best meal 1 have yet partaken of in the Caucasus. 

 To wash this down we ordered Kalmuck tea, evi- 

 dently quite the thing to drink here. The tea is 

 pressed in huge eake-like bricks, and is apparently 

 of no very high quality. A square of this is hacked 

 off, boiled down in a pot, and the tea served up in 

 one soup-bowl between two, with a spoon apiece. 

 It is correct to add to it milk, huge lumps of 

 butter, and pepper and salt to taste, when it resem- 

 bles soup a good deal more than tea. 



It was not until 3 P.M. next day (Thursday) 

 that I managed to get my 'podorojua' (travelling 

 ticket) and other things in order. At that hour it 

 was really too late to start on my long drive to the 

 Red Forest, but I was so sick of delays that I 

 determined to get as far as I could that night, and 

 trust to luck for the rest. My ycmstchik, who 

 had only a misty notion of the whereabouts of our 



