I WAS at Kutais in the beginning of May, and I walked from that town two hundred miles across the Caucasus to Vladikavkaz, which I am told is a notable feat. It will certainly remain very notable in my mind, both in respect of the sights I saw and of the adventures I survived. I ascended from the Italian loveliness of Imeretia, where the wild fruit was already ripening in the forests, to the bleak and barren solitudes of Ossetia, where I had to plough my way through ten miles of waist-deep snow. I was attacked by roughs at Gurshevi and escaped from them only to lose myself on the Mamison Pass, where I found the road overswept by a twelve-feet drift of snow. I spent the night with shepherds on the pass in a koutan, a shelter for cows and sheep, half-house, half-cave, made of stones and mud. A shepherd showed me a track over the snow next morning, and after five hours of the most arduous walking I ever did in my life I reached the other side of the Caucasus. But I arrived there only to have a new adventure. A heavy snowstorm had come on so that it was difficult to find the 189road, and at Lisri I inquired of a hillman lounging in the way. This man arrested me as a spy and asked ten shillings to release me, and since I refused to pay the bribe I was hailed before the Ataman to give an account of myself. Such account proving unsatisfactory, I was formally arrested, and in fact remained a prisoner for five days. Strangely enough I was hospitably entertained during my captivity by chiefs and priests, but the fifth night I spent actually in prison, in a dirty Caucasian gaol with two robbers and a madman.  
The air of Kutais is pungent with the fragrance of honeysuckle and sweet-briar, rhododendron and azalea—it tickles the nose. I set off on a peaceful Sunday morning when a sun hotter than we ever know in England, even in July, was flooding the valley of the River Rion with a superabundance of light and heat. The road, eighty miles long from Kutais to Oni, is perhaps the most beautiful in Europe, and this morning, its forested mountains bathed in grey-green loveliness and garlanded with flowers, it was a vision of Paradise. As a Georgian priest had said to me, “When you get there you will see; it is summer, everything is perfectly beautiful. It is heaven. If one were sent there after death one would not be disappointed.”
 
I took it very easily this first beautiful day, and between dawn and sunset walked not more than twenty miles. The swallow-tail butterflies and large silver-washed fritillaries sipping honey from bush to bush probably 190strayed further than I did. I envied not at all the dozen people crammed into the Oni stage-coach—a vehicle constructed apparently out of currant boxes. In fact, the shorter distance traversed in a day the richer has been that day, one may say. The travellers on the stage-coach certainly didn’t make a supper off wild strawberries as I did. That was the reward of my first day’s sauntering. I found them that day. I did not find any more. The land became cooler and cooler, the next day and the next, till it was obvious I was travelling out of summer into winter again. But these strawberries were rich; they were nearly as large as thimbles, and I gathered about two pounds of them.
 
I slept that night under a rock a hundred feet above the road, and suffered no disturbance either from robbers or from bears. A soft rain plumped down just after sunset but I was in shelter. I slept, and indeed I could not say what happened that night beyond that the goddesses of sleep were gentle and kind to me. Just before dawn next morning I was awakened to hear the cuckoo calling from the dark forest opposite. Something in myself craved hot tea. I jumped up and took the road.
 
I swiftly walked the eight versts to Mekhven, where an innkeeper was taking down his shutters, and I persuaded the man to put up his samovar and give me tea. Tea is a luxury in these parts, for wine is the cheaper drink. It was no ordinary affair that a stranger should 191walk in at dawn a............