UNBELIEVERS. 445 



some of his pictures, as reminiscences of a country witli 

 wliich European artists are as yet unacquainted. In the 

 evenings we went to the gardens in the German quarter, 

 known respectively as * Mon Plaisir ' and ' Sans Souci,' 

 where a crowd of townsfolk, sitting under cover, sip their 

 tea, and listen to the strains of a good band; or, if so 

 disposed, wander in couples down long alleys arched over 

 with trellised vmes, from which the grapes hanging in ripe 

 clusters seemed, at the present season, almost ready to 

 drop into one's mouth. Some of the accounts we heard of 

 the effect produced by the news of our ascent of Kazbek 

 were rather amusing. It had apparently caused much dis- 

 cussion at Tiflis among the citizens, who had all their 

 lives asserted the impossibility of reaching the summit. 

 We were told that, on the first intelligence being received, 

 a person high in authority had remarked, that it was 

 strange that a mountain which had been declared for sixty 

 years inaccessible by Russian officers, should be ascended 

 by Englishmen in a few days. The answer of the insulted 

 officers was prompt and ingenious : ' We could have said 

 we had been to the top as easily as the Englishmen ! ' I 

 do not think there was a single Russian in Tiflis, uncon- 

 nected with the Government, who believed in the truth of 

 our story. 



We amused Ourselves, during our stay at Tiflis, by con- 

 trasting our present ideas of the Central Caucasus with 

 those with which we had left the same place two months 

 previously, and in endeavouring to ascertain in what par- 

 ticulars the impressions acquired by reading or hearsay 

 had been reversed or modified by actual experience. We 

 found the process a profitable one, and I think a summary 

 of the results obtained will not be without interest to the 

 general reader. 



The published accounts of the Caucasus, that we had met 



