376 FROM PARI TO PATIGORSK. 



pleasant. At last liglits appeared, and we rode along 

 the outskirts of a large and scattered village, composed of 

 low houses, each standing apart from its neighbour, and 

 surrounded by its own garden. 



We had now entered the country of the Tcherkesses, the 

 most famous tribe of the Caucasus, from whom the whole 

 mountainous region between the Black and Caspian Seas is 

 often vaguely, and very incorrectly, called Circassia. We 

 were to lodge at the prince's house, situated at the farther 

 end of the village, within an enclosure surrounded by bams 

 and outbuildings. The interior bore witness to Eussian 

 influence. For the first time since leaving Kobi, we found 

 chairs and tables, knives and forks, and other luxuries of 

 Western life ; indeed, the room we slept in would have 

 been perfectly European in its appearance, but for the 

 illuminated texts of the Koran hung up against the walls. 

 The prince was a good-looking youth, of apparently less 

 than average intelligence ; in our case, at least, he meddled 

 only to muddle. Our horsemen, dissatisfied with the bar- 

 gam the TJruspieh princes had led them into, struck for 

 higher pay, which we refused to give, trusting, somewhat 

 rashly, to find others without difiiculty. In the morning 

 the prince seemed unable to give us any help, and declared 

 there were no horses unemployed, an assertion which was 

 hardly uttered when we saw a drove of at least two 

 hundred on the opposite bank of the river. 



A peasant having offered to provide a bullock-cart and 

 one horse to take us to Zonitzki, the nearest post-station, 

 forty versts off, we accepted his offer as the simplest means 

 of escape from our difi&culty, and set out in this novel 

 style. The road led for many miles over rolling hills, 

 which, but for the luxuriant herbage with which they were 

 covered, might have been taken for part of the South 

 Downs of Sussex, the level steppe in front looking from a 



