148 
TIFLIS DURING THE FLOODS. 
them at once; and they come headlong down, knocking off 
others in their fall, and crushing all they find beneath. The 
road then becomes impassable, till labourers are sent to clear 
the path by, perhaps, launching the broken rocks over some 
adjoining steep ; for, in these tracks of Caucasus, precipices are 
on every side, above and below. Sometimes, when the mass is 
too big for such an operation, they have to make a new road 
round the fallen rocks ; and that often brings the foot of the 
next traveller close to the edge of an abyss. 
My opportune arrival at Tiflis had spared me experiencing 
the effects of these worst of mountain horrors ; but the bad 
weather had yet made itself to be felt by me, in more ways than 
one. I was prevented exploring many interesting spots in the 
neighbourhood, lest some of these very floods, though in a minor 
degree, might have crossed me ; and I was confined in a city, 
where the depth of the mud in the streets would hardly suffer a 
man to stir without-doors. But here, I must beg leave to re¬ 
mark, that the mud inside of most houses, nearly equalled the 
quantity without; so I was the sooner reconciled to being shut 
up in my own more comfortable quarters. The ordinary style 
of habitation in Tiflis being purely Asiatic, as I said before, is 
flat-roofed, covered in with hard-beaten earth. After any con¬ 
tinued rain the water soaks through this ineffectual defence as 
if it were some huge filtering machine; and, running down the 
inside of the walls, nay, pouring through the extended surface 
of the roof itself, the whole house becomes inundated. But the 
evil stops not there; the earth of the floor is broken up by the 
flood from above ; and what was at first only a thorough drench¬ 
ing of water, is then little better than an actual morass. The 
poor inhabitants, without a dry spot to sit or lie down on, are 
