92 
GOOD GARA. 
ere we durst lay aside our apprehensions, or feel that free 
respiration which our giddy elevation had repressed. But, 
perilous as we found this desperate ascent, it was nothing to the 
dangers of those who dare it in the winter. At that season, 
the whole, buried in snow, appears almost perpendicular with 
the side of the mountain. It can never, then, be attempted but 
on foot; and, on the arrival of travellers, soldiers or natives pre¬ 
cede them, in order to find the road, and to form a path through 
the thick untrodden surface. They ascend in a string; the first 
advances with a rope round his waist, which is held, at different 
lengths, by his companions as they follow one after another. This 
is done to prevent the leader’s destruction, should his foot slip in 
the uncertain track. But notwithstanding all this care, no winter 
passes, without numbers of soldiers, Cossacks, and natives, besides 
travellers, falling over this dreadful steep. 
On enquiring of one of my companions, a resident in the country, 
what was done in the case of carriages meeting in this road, 
he informed me, such a circumstance had been rendered impos¬ 
sible. When convoys were to pass in either direction, people 
/ 
were sent forward at a sufficiently early hour, to detain the one 
till the passage of the other had left the road open. In going 
along it, I could not but wonder at finding this, the most dan¬ 
gerous part in our whole route, evidently the most neglected. 
Independent of the extreme narrowness, and therefore, thus 
situated, increased peril of the road ; at every fifty yards we 
might stumble over large or loose stones, some half buried in 
the ground, and others just on the edge of the precipice. From 
the nature of the face of the mountains, which is a slaty kind of 
rock, the path could be widened and smoothed with little diffi¬ 
culty or labour. 
