240 EN ROUTE FOR DAGHESTAN. 



Englishman should read what I have written, and, 

 tempted by hope of sport, follow in my track, let 

 him take one piece of advice from me. Never 

 believe any one between the Black Sea and the 

 Caspian ; or, at least, never build any hopes on 

 alluring prospects suggested to your mind by the 

 statements of natives. To me Gungha was to be a 

 land of perfect peace, where in a really good hotel 

 I should lay down my weary limbs, and, after a 

 good supper, forget, in clean sheets, the injuries 

 inflicted on me by the merciless bumpings of my 

 travelling-cart. 1 admit that the vision of clean 

 sheets seemed far too good to be true, but when I 

 found that the occupant of the best inn's best room 

 could not even get a samovar until the host's 

 family had finished with it, and no better bed than 

 the floor and his bourka would constitute, I felt, 

 indeed, the vanity of all human hopes. 



Gungha is a much better name for the town 

 than Elizabetpol. It has a thoroughly Asiatic 

 sound, as the town has a thoroughly Asiatic aspect : 

 flat-topped houses, thrown pell-mell together, with- 

 out design or reason in their arrangement ; roads 

 that are destitute of trottoirs, full of pitfalls and 

 rocks by turns ; at one time dark wildernesses of 

 blinding dust-storms, at another hopeless morasses, 

 in which you sink knee-deep in mud ; open sewers 

 by every roadside, and a sufficient quantity of 

 trees scattered throughout to insure fever in its 



