THE Khvamli Table Mountain seems to stand as a fort between the north and the south, and it is an extraordinary sight. Its uppermost two thousand feet are naked of verdure. The grey cliff, a mile long, rises sheer from the crests of a green forest and extends in a regular battlemented array, which suggests a great city wall. On one side of that mountain I found summer, and on the other winter.  
It was an extraordinary experience to climb out of an almost tropical summer into a land where the trees were only just budding, and the snowdrop and crocus were in bloom, and where the snow had not yet melted from the road. I had started on a Sunday when the weather approximated to that of July; on Friday I had reached March, and on Saturday I was in mid-winter.
 
I passed through Oni, an unusual town, in which scarcely a new house has been built since the twelfth century, and which is now inhabited by a tribe of mountain Jews living in peculiar isolation. This was on Thursday afternoon, and I spent the night in an inn 195nine miles north, at the little town of Utsera, now fast becoming a popular health resort though a hundred miles from a railway station. It is about the height of Mount Snowdon, on the fringe of an ancient pine forest. At Utsera it was raining on the Friday morning. At the next village, Glola, a thousand feet higher, the rain was changed for sleet. The road ascends through a fir wood said to be the grandest in the Caucasus; the pines are as broad-trunked as some of our famous oaks, and they rise straight as a die to almost incredible height. Their ancient hoariness and greyness add to their majestic appearance.
 
I was now nearing the neck of the mountains and stormy Mamison. The Rion, broad at Kutais, was here but a small torrent. The road, if such it can be called, was traversed by many cascades and broken away by rocks and rivers, so that a horseman could pass only with difficulty. To vehicular traffic it was completely closed. Sitting at any point of the road one could count literally scores of uprooted pines. Above Glola the sun came out, the same hot Caucasian sun, though tempered by the cold air, and, as if to pretend that summer was there, the Camberwell Beauty butterfly (of name obviously not universal) flitted to and fro flaunting its purple and gold. Under the pine trees were wild snowdrops thick clustered, and on the roadway even little purple crocuses.
 
The road became difficult to manage, two bridges 196having been entirely washed away. I had at one point to leap fifteen feet on to a black snowdrift, which I feared might give under me. But I succeeded and won my way to Gurshevi. That was the first village of the Ossetines, and had generally a bad name. Some years ago an explorer and two guides disappeared entirely in this region, and have never been heard of since. And I had an adventure there which greatly alarmed me. I had not stopped at the village; it was difficult of access, being upon a cliff, and I strode forward toward the pass. But a verst forward on the road I was hailed from a distance by four roughs, who demanded a rouble. I hurried on. They called “Stop!” But I paid no attention, seeing that they were extremely heavily clad and could not hope to catch me up; they were in a valley about five hundred feet below. The road, however, was extraor............