446 KETL'KN TO TIFLIS. 



with before leaving England, had been more or less vague 

 and unsatisfactory. Their authors had, as a rule, kept at 

 a respectful distance from the giants of the chain, and, 

 indulging chiefly in ethnological researches, confined 

 themselves, v^hen they approached mountain scenery, 

 to generalities, useless to the mountaineer, anxious to form 

 some idea of the character of the range, the height of its 

 peaks, and the relations of its groups. Those who did 

 give information on the subject contradicted one another 

 in the most emphatic manner, and onl}^ increased the 

 perplexity of the reader. We learnt from one writer : 

 ' The mountains of the Caucasus are not j^eaked, as in the 

 Alps, but are either flat or cup-shaped ; the existence of 

 glaciers is uncertain.'^ We read in another : ' Neither 

 the Swiss Alps, the Taurus, Atlas, Balkan, Apennine, or 

 any of the well-known mountains of Eui'ope, have such 

 furrowed and broken, rocky and snowy precijjices, or 

 such bold peaks, as the giants of the main chain of the 

 Caucasus. The Orientals have rightly named these moun- 

 tains the "thousand-pointed." 'f 



The first-quoted opinion seemed the most popular, and 

 many of our friends in England smiled at our idea of set- 

 ting out to climb in a region where, as they believed, there 

 were no valleys or steep-sided summits, and where nothing 

 was to be seen except two large volcanoes, rising from a 

 lofty plateau, and culminating in snowslopes, the ascent of 

 which would be equally laborious and uninteresting. 



These accounts so far imposed upon us that, when we 

 reached Constantinople, the chief impression in our minds 

 was, that the Central Caucasus consisted of a long water- 

 shed, devoid of prominent peaks, and dominated at either 

 end by a huge dome — the eastern known as Kazbek, the 



* Keith Johnston's ' Dictionary of Geography.' 



t Travels in Georgia, Persia, and Kiirdistau (Wagner, 1856). 



