404 THE TCHEKEK VALLEY. 



mere crack in the lower slopes of the mountains, like 

 those of PfefPers and the Via Mala ; it is rather a huge 

 trench, dug down from their very summits to a depth of 

 5,000 feet or more. Behind us forest trees clung to every 

 available inch of ground ; looking upwards, the character 

 of the defile was more savage. The foaming waters of 

 the Tcherek, crossed three times by bridges, filled the 

 bottom of the trench, the sides of which were perpendicu- 

 lar walls, succeeded by shelves, capped in their turn by a 

 loftier tier of precipices. The path, a mere ladder of broken 

 stones, brought us, by a rapid series of zigzags, to a most 

 extraordinary spot, where the overhanging cliffs meet, and 

 form a natural bridge over the river, which can barely 

 be seen at the bottom of its deep bed. As we looked from 

 this spot, the torrent to all appearance plunged directly 

 into the bowels of the mountains, and it was impossible 

 to discover how it found a way out of them. The savage 

 grandeur of the scenery here attains its height, and no 

 words will convey to others the impression it made on us. 

 Henceforth the cleverly-contrived rock-staircase which 

 connects Balkar with the outside world finds room — 

 now on one side, now on the other — to creep along 

 the base of the clifFs at the river's edge ; at last, when 

 the careless observer would think it was hopelessly de- 

 feated, it crawls along the face of an overhanging bluff, 

 by a gallery, partly cut into the rock, partly built out from 

 it. This difiieult passage surmounted, it leads an easier 

 life ; the mountains draw back from the river in two grand 

 curtains of precij)ice, and the basin in which the hamlets 

 of Balkar are situate gradually opens to the view. We 

 now wound over barren and disintegrated slopes, broken 

 occasionally by stone-capped earth-pillars, similar to those 

 we had seen before in the Caucasus, on the Ardon, and to 

 the well-known examples in the Val d'Herens in Switzer- 

 land. 



