Beggars, who in Russia are as thick about the churches as the pigeons

that pick up crumbs in front of St. Mark's, are almost essential

to the histrionic panoramas at these places of pilgrimage. I have

never seen so large or so varied a collection of professional and

casual mendicants as within and about the sacred enclosures of Kief.

Some appeared to enjoy vested rights; these privileged personages

would as little endure to be driven from a favoured post as with us

a sweeper at a crossing would tolerate a rival broom. Several of

these waiters upon charity might be termed literary beggars; their

function is to read aloud from a large book in the hearing of the

passers-by. They are often infirm, and occasionally blind, but they

read just the same. Another class may be called the incurables; in

England they would be kept out of sight, but here in Russia, running

sores, mutilated hands and legs, are valuable as stock-in-trade.

Loathsome diseases are thrust forward as a threat, distorted limbs

are extortionate for alms; it is a piteous sight to see; some of

these sad objects are in the jaws of death, and come apparently

that they may die on holy ground. Another class may be called the

pious beggars; they stand at the church doors; they are picturesque

and apostolic; long beards and quiet bearing, with a certain

professional get-up of misery and desolation, make these sacred

mendicants grand after their kind. Such figures are usually ranged

on either side of the chief entrance; they are motionless as statues,

save when in the immediate act of soliciting alms; indeed I have

sometimes noticed how beggars standing before a church façade are

suggestive of statuary, the want of which is so much felt in the

unsculpturesque architecture of Russia. Pilgrims and beggars--the

line of demarcation it is not always easy to define--have an Oriental

way of throwing themselves into easy and paintable attitudes; in

fact posture plays a conspicuous part in the devotions of such

people; they pray bodily almost more than mentally,--the figure

and its attendant costume become instruments of worship.

The Cathedral of St. Sophia, which dates back to the Eleventh Century,

is of interest from its resemblance to St. Mark's, Venice, in the

plan of the Greek cross, in the use of domes and galleries, and

in the introduction of mosaics as surface-decorations. I saw the

galleries full of fashionable worshippers; the galleries in St. Mark's

on the contrary, are always empty and useless, though constructed for

use. In the apse are the only old mosaics I have met with in Russia;

it is strange that an art which specially pertains to Byzantium

was not turned to more account by the Greco-Russian Church. There

is in the apse, besides, a subject composition,--a noble female

figure, colossal in size, the arms upraised in attitude of prayer,

the drapery cast broadly and symmetrically. In the same interior

are associated with mosaics, frescoes, or rather wall-paintings

in _secco_. On the columns which support the cupola are frescoes

which, though of no art value, naturally excited curiosity when

they were discovered some few years since, after having been hid

for two or more centuries by a covering of whitewash. Some other

wall-pictures are essentially modern, and others have been restored,

after Russian usage, in so reckless and wholesale a fashion as to

be no longer of value as archæologic records. In the staircase

leading to the galleries are some further wall-paintings, said to

be contemporaneous with the building of the cathedral; the date,

however, is wholly uncertain. These anomalous compositions represent

a boar-hunt and other sports, with groups of musicians, dancers,

and jugglers, intervening. In accord with the secular character of

the subjects is the rude naturalism of the style. Positive knowledge

as to date being wanting, it is impossible to speak of these works

otherwise than to say that they cannot be of Byzantine origin.

If of real antiquity they will have to join company with other

semi-barbaric products in metal, etc., which prove, as we have

seen, that Russia has two historic schools, the Byzantine, on the

one hand, debilitated and refined, as of periods of decline, and,

on the other, a non-Byzantine and barbarous style, strong and coarse

as of races still vital and vigorous. A like conflict is found in

the North of Italy between the Byzantine and the Lombard manner;

and even in England the west front of Wells Cathedral presents the

same unresolved contradictions. It would seem that over the greater

part of Europe, Eastern as well as Western, these two hostile arts

were practiced contemporaneously; at all events the same buildings

are found to display the two opposite styles. It would appear probable,

however, that the respective artists or artisans belonged to at

least two distinct nationalities.

The Pecherskoi Monastery, or Kievo-Pecherskaya Lavra, at Kief, the

Kremlin in Moscow, and the grand monastery of Troitza, have this

in common, that the situation is commanding, the site elevated.

Also, these three venerable sanctuaries are strongholds, for though

the holy places at Kief are not on all sides fortified, yet the

approach from the old city, which is the most accessible, lies

along bastions and walls. In fact, here we have again a semblance

to the ancient idea of a church, a citadel, and a palace united,

as in an acropolis--the Church and the State being one; the arm

of the flesh sustaining the sword of the spirit,--a condition of

things which has always given to the world its noblest art. The

walk to this most ancient monastery in Russia passes pleasantly by

the side of a wood; then opens a view of the vast plain beneath,

intersected by the river Dnieper, over which is flung the great

suspension-bridge built by the English engineer, Charles Vignolles,

at the cost of £350,000. The immediate approach is lined with open

shops or stalls for the sale of sacred pictures, engravings of

saints, and other articles which pilgrims love to carry back to

their homes. Within the enclosure trees throw a cool shade, under

which, as in the courtyards of mosques in Constantinople, the hot

and weary may repose.

The cathedral dedicated to the ascension of the Virgin, has not

the slightest pretence to external architecture. The walls are

mostly whitewashed, and some of the windows have common square

heads crowned by mean pediments; the intervening pilasters and

floral decorations in relief, and all in the midst of whitewash,

are of the poorest character. The seven gilded cupolas or domes

may be compared to inverted cups surmounted by crosses. The form

resembles the cup commonly combined in the fantastic towers and

spires of Protestant churches in Germany, where, however, it has

been supposed to signify that the laity partake of the chalice.

These domes are made further decorative at the point of the small

circular neck which connects the cupola with the upper member or

finial; around this surface is painted a continuous series of single

saints standing; the effect of these pictures against the sky,

if not quite artistic, is striking. Other parts of the exterior

may indicate Italian rather than Oriental origin, but the style

is far too mongrel to boast of any legitimate parentage. Here,

as in the Kremlin, are external wall-paintings of saints, some

standing on solid ground, others sitting among clouds; the Madonna

is of course of the company, and the First and Second Persons of

the Trinity crown the composition. The ideas are trite and the

treatment is contemptible--the colours pass from dirty red into

brown and black. These certainly are the worst wall-paintings I

have ever met with, worse even than the coarsest painted shrines

on the waysides of Italy; indeed no Church save the Greek Church

would tolerate an art thus debased. A year after my journey to Kief

I travelled through the Tyrol on my way from the Ammergau Passion

Play. The whole of this district abounds in frescoes, many being on

the external walls of private dwellings. This village art of the

Bavarian Highlands, though often the handiwork of simple artisans,

puts to shame both the external and the internal wall-paintings at

Kief, Troitza, and the Kremlin. Yet this contrast between Russia

and Southern nations does not arise so much from the higher ability

of the artists, as from the superiority of the one school to the

other school. The pictorial arts fostered by the Western Church

are fundamentally true, while the arts which the Eastern Church has

patronized and petrified are essentially false and effete.

The scene which strikes the eye on entering this parti-coloured

Cathedral of the Assumption, though strange, is highly picturesque.

To this holy shrine are brought the halt, the lame, and the blind,

as to the moving of the waters. Some press forward to kiss the

foot of a crucifix, others bow the head and kiss the ground, a

servile attitude of worship, which in the Greco-Russian Church

has been borrowed from the Mohammedans. The groups which throng

the narrow, crowded floor, are wonderfully effective; an artist

with sketch-book in hand would have many a good chance of catching

graphic heads and costumes, and all the more easily because these

pilgrims are not so lively as lethargic. Still, for grand scenic

impression, I have never in Russia witnessed any church function so

striking as the piazza in front of St. Peter's on Easter Day, when

all Rome flocks to receive the Pope's blessing from the balcony.

Yet the whole interior of this cathedral is itself a picture, or

rather a countless succession of pictures; as to the architecture

there is not the minutest space that has not been emblazoned by

aid of a paint-pot.

But the greatest marvel in this Cathedral of the Assumption is

the iconostas, or screen for the sacred pictures, a structure

indispensable to all Russian churches, of which I have withheld the

description till now, when I find myself in front of a large and

more astounding erection than can be found in St. Petersburg, Moscow,

or Troitza. In small churches these sacred placards, bearing the

character of drop-scenes, are apt to be paltry, indeed the irreverent

stranger may even be reminded of painted caravans at village fairs.

But in large cathedrals the screen which stands between the people

in the nave and the priests in the holy of holies, presents a vast

façade, upon which are ranged, in three, four, or five stories,

a multitude of sacred pictures covered with gold and decked with

jewels. These elaborate contrivances correspond to the reredos

in Western churches, only with this important difference, that

they are not behind the holy place but in front of it. They might,

perhaps, with more correctness be compared to the rood-screens which

in our churches stand between the altar and the people. The sacred

screen now before me mounts its head into the dome, and presents an

imposing and even an architectonic aspect, but certain details,

such as classic mouldings of columns, and a broken entablature,

pronounce the edifice to be comparatively modern. The summit is

fitly crowned by a crucifix, almost in the flat, in order not to

evade the law of the Russian Church, which prohibits statues in the

round; the figure of Christ is silver, the cross and the drapery

of gold or silver-gilt. On either side of the crucifix stand in

their prescriptive stations the Madonna and St. John. On the story

beneath comes the entombment, all covered with gold and silver,

in a low-relief which indicates the forms of the figures beneath;

the heads, which are not in relief but merely pictorial, are the

only portions of the picture actually visible.

These altar-screens, which in Russia are counted not by tens but

by hundreds and thousands, are highly ornate. Silver and gold and

jewellery are conjoined with painting after the nursery and doll-like

fashion approved in the South of Spain and at Naples. Only in the

most corrupt of Roman Catholic capitals does ecclesiastical art

assume the childish forms common in Russia. Resuming the description

of the above altar-screen, we find next in range below the entombment

a large composition, comprising God the Father surrounded by cherubs,

with two full-grown seraphs, encircled by six gold wings, standing

on either side. Again, the only parts of the picture permitted to

be seen are the heads, crossed hands, black legs and feet. Christ

with the open book of judgment is another conspicuous figure; also a

companion head, gigantic in size, is the Madonna, directly Byzantine

in type, though its smooth and well-kept surface gives little sign of

age. The Christ, too, must be accounted but as modernized Byzantine;

here is none of the severity or of the tenuity of the early periods.

The type is poor though refined, debilitated though ideal. The hair,

parted on the forehead, falls thickly on the shoulders. The face is

youthful, not more than thirty, and without a wrinkle; the cheeks

are a little flushed, the prevailing expression is placidity. The

accessories of glory, drapery, and open book are highly decorative;

here embossed patterns on the gold coverings enhance the richness

of the surface-ornament. Once again the Russians appear supreme

in metal-work, especially in the elaboration of decoration in the

flat. Most of the pictures above mentioned are evidently supremely

holy; they are black and highly gilded; moreover, they move most

deeply all sorts and conditions of men, women, and children.

I may here again mention that one purpose of my Russian journey was

to discover whether there were heads of Christ in the possession

of the Russian Church older or nobler than the ivory carvings, the

frescoes, or easel pictures which are found in Italy and other

Southern or Western nations. And I was, I confess, disappointed not

to meet with any data which could materially enlarge or enrich this

most interesting of subjects. As to priority of date, it seems to be

entirely on the side of the Roman catacombs and the Latin Church;

moreover, in Russia, as I before frequently remarked, chronology

is untrustworthy, inasmuch as comparatively modern works assume

and parody the style of the most ancient. The heads of Christ in

Russia, one of which has been just described, are, as already said,

more or less servile reproductions of Byzantine types. Still the

typical form is found under varying phases; the general tendency

in these replicas of anterior originals would appear to be towards

the mitigation of the asperities in the confirmed Byzantine formulas.

Thus the more recent heads of the Saviour in the churches of St.

Petersburg, Moscow, Troitza and Kief, assume a certain modern manner,

and occasionally wear a smooth, pretty and ornamental aspect. In

these variations on the prescriptive Eastern type, the hair usually

flows down upon the shoulders, as with the Greek and Russian Priests

in the present day. As to the beard, it is thick and full, or short

and scant, but the cheeks are left uncovered, and show an elongated

face and chin.

These Russian heads of the Saviour in softening down the severe and

aged type common to Byzantium, assume a physiognomy not sufficiently

intellectual for the Greatest of Teachers. These "images" in fact

inspire little reverence except with blind worshippers; they are

mostly wrought up and renovated, so as to fulfil the preconceived

conditions of sanctity: undefined generality, weakness, smoothness,

and blackness, are the common characteristics of these supposititious

heads of the Saviour. It will thus again be easily understood how

opposite has been the practice of the Eastern and Western Churches;

it is a striking fact that at the time when, in Italy, under Leonardo

da Vinci, Raphael and others, the mystery of a God manifest in the

flesh had been as it were solved by a perfected art, this Russian

Church was still under bondage to the once accepted but now discarded

notion that the Redeemer ought to be represented as one who had no

form or comeliness. Art in the Western world gained access to the

beautiful, the perfect, and the divine, as soon as it was permitted

to the painter or the sculptor to develop to uttermost perfection

the idea of the Man-God. All such conceptions of the infinite,

whether it be that of Jupiter in pagan periods, or of Christ under

our divine dispensation, have always been the life and inspiration

of the arts. But in Russia ignoble heads of Christ convinced me that

such life and inspiration were denied. And I look upon the head

of Christ as the turning point in the Christian art of a nation.

If that head be conceived of unworthily there is no possibility

that prophets, apostles, martyrs, shall receive their due.

[Illustration: LA LAVRA, KIEF.]

_NIJNI-NOVGOROD_

_ANTONIO GALLENGA_

Nijni-Novgorod, or Lower New-town, is older than Moscow, and only

not so old as Novgorod the Great, which was a contemporary of Venice,

and was still new when the semi-fabulaus Ruric and his Varangians

are supposed to have given their name to Russia.

Nijni-Novgorod, which everybody here calls simply "Nijni," dates

from 1222; and mention of its fair occurs, we are told, in 1366,

since which epoch its celebration has suffered very rare and only

violent interruption.

To understand why this venerable spot should have been for so many

years, and should be still, so extensively favoured by the world's

trade, it is hardly necessary to see it. We only need bear in mind

that Nijni lies near the confluence of the Oka and the Volga, two

of the greatest rivers of this Russia which alone of all countries

of Europe may be said to have great rivers; the Volga having a

course of 2,320 miles, and the Oka, a mere tributary, of 850 miles.

It is the position which the Saöne and the Rhone have made for Lyons;

the position for which St. Louis is indebted to the Mississippi and

Missouri; the position which Corientes will soon owe to the Parana

and the Paraguay.

Nijni lies at the very centre of that water communication which

joins the Caspian and the Black Sea to the White Sea and the Baltic,

and which, were it always summer, might almost have enabled Russia

to dispense with roads and railroads.

But Nijni is, besides, the terminus of the railway from Moscow.

That line places this town and its fair in communication with all

the lines of Russia and the Western World, while the Volga, with

its tributary, the Kama, leads to Perm, and the Pass of the Ural

Mountains, and the vast regions of Siberia and Central Asia.

Nijni-Novgorod is thus one of the most important links between

the two great continents, the point of contact between Asiatic

wealth and European industry; and its fair the best meeting-place

for the interchange of commodities between the nations that still

walk, ride, or row at the rate of three to five miles an hour,

and those who fly on the wings of steam at the rate of thirty to

fifty.

The site of Nijni is somewhat like what I still remember of St.

Louis after a seventeen years' interval. We travelled from Moscow

over a distance of 273 miles in thirteen hours. For the last hour

or two before we reached our journey's end, we had on our right

the river Oka and a hilly ridge rising all along it and forming

its southern bank.

On alighting at the station we drove through a flat, marshy ground,

intersected by broad canals, to a triangular space between the

Oka and the Volga at their confluence, where the fair is held.

We went through the maze of bazaars and market buildings, of rows

of booths, shops and stalls, eating and drinking sheds, warehouses

and counting-houses. We struggled through long lines of heavy-laden

country carts, and swarms of clattering _droskies_, all striving to

force their way along with that hurry-skurry that adds to confusion

and lessens speed; and we came at last to a long pontoon bridge, over

which we crossed the Oka, and beyond which rises the hill-range or

ravine, on the top and at the foot of which is built the straggling

town of Nijni-Novgorod.

Nijni-Novgorod is a town of 45,000 inhabitants, and, like most

Russian towns, it occupies a space which could accommodate half a

million of people. Like many old Russian towns, also, it is laid

out on the pattern of Moscow, as far as its situation allowed;

and, to keep up the resemblance, it boasts a Kremlin of its own,

a grim, struggling citadel with battlemented walls and mediæval

towers over its gates, with its scores of Byzantine churches, most

of them with their five cupolas _de rigueur_, clustering together

like a bunch of radishes--one big radish between four little

radishes--but not as liberally covered with gilding as those which

glisten on the top of sacred buildings in St. Petersburg or Moscow;

down the slopes and ravines are woods and gardens, with coffee-houses

and eating-houses, and other places of popular entertainment.

It is a town to be admired on the outside and at a distance as a

picture, but most objectionable as a residence on account of its

marvellous distances and murderous pavement, a stroll on which

reminds you of the martyrdom of those holy pilgrims who, to give

glory to God, walked with dry peas in their shoes.

The pavements are bad in Nijni town, but worse in Nijni fair, for

if in the former all is hard, sharp, uneven flint, in the latter,

what is not wood is mud, and what is not mud is dust, for heavy

showers alternate with stifling heat; and, after a three hours'

drought one would say that these good people, who live half in

and half out of a swamp, and who drink anything rather than water,

can never spare a poor drop to slake the pulverized clay of their

much trodden thoroughfares.

With all these drawbacks, however, and even with the addition of

its villainous smells, this is an interesting and striking spot.

No place can boast of a more sublime view than one can get here

from the Imperial Palace and Terrace, or from the church-domes

or spires on the Kremlin; or, even better, from the Esplanade of

Mouravief's Folly--a tower erected by the well-known General of

that name on the highest and foremost ravine, and on the summit of

which he had planned to place a fac-simile of the famous Strassburg

clock, but constructed on so gigantic a scale that hours and minutes,

the moon's phases, the planets' cycles and all besides, should be

distinctly visible from every locality of the town and fair for

miles and miles around.

From any of those vantage-grounds on the hill look down. The town

is at your feet; the fair--a city, a Babylon of shops--stretches

beyond the bridge; the plain, a boundless ocean of green, field and

forest, dotted here and there with church-spires and factory-shafts

at prodigious distances; and the two broad rivers, bearing the

tribute of remote regions from north and south in numberless boats

and lighters, and neat gallant steamers; the two streams meeting

here at right angles just below the pontoon-bridge where an immense

five-domed church of recent construction has been reared to mark

and hallow the spot.

Down at the fair, in the centre of its hubbub, rises the governor's

summer-place. The governor dwells there with his family during the

few weeks of the fair (mid-August to mid-September), coming down

hither from the Imperial Palace in the town Kremlin, and occupying

the upper floor. The whole basement, the entrance-hall, and all

passages--with the exception of a narrow, private, winding

staircase--are invaded by the crowd and converted into a bazaar,

the noisiest in the fair, where there is incessant life and movement,

and music and hurly-burly at every hour between noon and night--a

lively scene upon which his Excellency and his guests and friends

look down from the balcony after their five o'clock dinner, smoking

their cigarettes, and watching the policemen as they pounce like

trained hawks on the unwary pick-pockets prowling among the crowd.

Of this immense mass of strangers now in Nijni, the town itself,

and especially the upper town, sees and hears but little.

The fair has its own ground, on its own side of the bridge, its

own hotels and lodging-houses, its own churches, chapels, theatres,

eating, gambling, and other houses, its long straight streets and

boulevards, and pleasure as well as business resorts.

It has its fine Chinese Row, though Chinamen have lately discontinued

their attendance; it has rich traders' temporary homes, fitted up

with comfort, and even taste and luxury; and it has its charity

dormitory, a vast wooden shed, built by Court Ignatieff, and bearing

his name, intended to accommodate 250 houseless vagrants, but alas! in

a place where there must be 20,000, if not 200,000 persons answering

that description.

Of women coming to this market the number is comparatively small--one,

I should say, for every 100 men; of ladies not one in 10,000, or

100,000.

Of those who muster sufficiently strong at the evening promenade

on the Boulevard, indigenous or resident, for the most part, rather

the look than the number is formidable; and it is here in Nijni,

as it is generally in Russia, that a Mussulman becomes convinced

of the wisdom of his Arabian prophet, who invented the yashmak

as man's best protection, and hallowed it; for of the charms of

most Russian women, blessed are those who believe without seeing!

In working hours only men and beasts are to be seen--a jumble and

scramble of men and beasts: car-loads of goods; piles of hogsheads,

barrels, bales, boxes, and bundles, merchandise of all kinds, of

every shape, colour, or smell, all lying in a mass topsy-turvy,

higgledy-piggledy; the thoroughfares blocked up, the foot-paths

encumbered; chaos and noise all-pervading; and yet, by degrees, almost

imperceptibly, you will see everything going its way, finding its own

place; for every branch of trade has, or was at least intended to

have, here its appointed abode; and there are Tea Rows; Silversmiths

and Calico Streets; Fur Lanes; Soap, Candle, and Caviare Alleys;

Photograph, Holy Images, and Priestly Vestments Bazaars; Boot,

Slop, Tag and Rag Marts and Depositories--all in their compartments,

kin with kin, and like with like; and everything is made to clear

out of the way, and all is smoothed down; all subsides into order

and rule, and not very late at night--quiet.

The Tartars do the most of the work.

They are the descendants of the old warriors of Genghis Khan and

Timour the Lame, of the ruthless savages who for 200 years overran

all Russia, spreading death and desolation wherever their coursers'

hoofs trod, making slaves of the people, and tributary vassals of

their Princes; but, who by their short-sighted policy favoured the

rise of that dynasty of Moscow Grand Princes, who presently became

strong enough to extend their sway both over Russ and Tartar.

The great merchants of Moscow and St. Petersburg or their

representatives and partners come here for a few days, partners and

clerks taking up the task by turns, according as business allows

them absence from their chief establishments.

They bring here no goods, but merely samples of goods--tea, cotton,

woollen and linen tissues, silk, cutlery, jewellery, and generally

all articles of European (home Russian) manufacture.

They have most of them good apartments in the upper floors of their

warehouses; they see their customers, mostly provincial retail

dealers; they show their samples, drive their bargains, receive

orders, attend on 'Change (for they have a _Bourse_ at the fair,

near the bridge), smoke indoors (for in the streets that indulgence

is forbidden all over the fair for fear of fire), lunch or dine

together often by mutual invitation.

They are gentlemenly men, young men for the most part (for their

elders are at home minding the main business), young Russians or

Russified Germans, some of whom adopt and even affect and exaggerate

Russian feeling and habits; young men to whom it seems to be a

principle that easy-made money should be readily spent; leisurely,

business young men, who sit up late and get up later, take the world

and its work and pleasure at their ease; understand little and

care even less about politics; profess to be neither great readers

nor great thinkers; but are, as a rule, free-handed, hospitable,

sociable, most amiable, and anything rather than unintelligent men.

Of all the articles of trade which come to court public favour

in Nijni, the most important and valuable is tea; and although

the Moscow merchants, by the excellence of their sea-faring tea,

chiefly imported from Odessa or through England, have almost entirely

driven from the market the caravan tea, still about one-tenth of

the enormous quantity of tea sold here is grown in the north of

China, and comes overland from Kiakhta, the city on the border

between the Asiatic-Russian and the Celestial Empire.

I was curious to compare the taste of some of the very best qualities

of both kinds, and was brought to the conclusion, confirmed by the

opinion of gentlemen interested in the sale of sea-faring tea,

that, although some of their own is more high-flavoured and stronger,

there is in the Kiakhta tea an exquisite delicacy, which will always

receive in its favour a higher price. The difference, I am told,

mainly arises from the fact that the caravan tea, exposed to the

air during its twelve months' journey in loose and clumsy and

much-shaken paper and sheep-skin bundles, gets rid of the tannin

and other gross substances, a process of purification which cannot

be effected in the necessarily sealed and hermetically-closed boxes

in which it reaches Europe by the sea-route; so that if sea-faring

tea, like port-wine, easily recommends itself to the taste and

nerves of a strong, hard-working man, a dainty, refined lady will

give preference to a cup of Kiakhta tea, as she would to a glass

of Château Yquem.

The interest of a European, however, would be chiefly attracted

by what is less familiar in his own part of the world; and, short

of an actual journey to the remote regions of Siberia and Central

Asia, nothing is calculated to give him a more extensive idea of

the produce of those Trans-Uralian Russian possessions than a survey

of the goods they send here for sale.

What astonishes a stranger at first sight is the quantity. You may

walk for hours along yards and sheds, the repositories of iron from

Siberia. You pass hundreds of shops of malachite and lapis-lazuli,

and a variety of gold and silver work and precious stones from the

Caucasus, cut with all the minute diligence of Asiatic skill. You

will see Turkish carpets, Persian silks, and above all things the

famous Orenburg shawls, so finely knitted, and with such patience

that one can (they say, but I have not made the experiment), be

made to pass through a lady's ring, though they be so broad on

all sides as to wrap the lady all around from head to foot.

One may, besides, have his choice of hundreds and thousands of

those delightful curiosities and knickknacks, recommendable less

for their quaintness than for the certainty one feels that there

is no possible use in the world they may be put to.

There is no novelty at Nijni; no new shape, pattern, or colour

just coming out to catch popular favour; no unknown mechanical

contrivance; no discovery likely to affect human progress and brought

here for the entertainment of the intelligent, un-commercial visitor.

There are only the shop-keeper and his customer, though it is a

wholesale shop and on a very large scale.

The fair, moreover, has not the duration that is generally allowed

for an Exhibition.

[Illustration: NIJNI-NOVGOROD (BRIDGE OF THE FAIR).]

Though officially opened on the 27th of July, the fair does not

begin in good earnest till the 18th of August; and it reaches its

height on the 27th, when accounts are settled, and payments ensue;

after which, goods are removed, and the grounds cleared; only a

portion of the business lingering throughout September.

About half a score of days, out of the two months during which the

fair is held, are all that may have attraction for the generality

of strangers. And although many come from all parts of Russia, and

from foreign countries, I do not think they tarry here for pleasure

beyond two or three days.

It would be interesting to anticipate what change a few weeks will

effect in this scene which is now so full of life, bustle, and

gaiety; this stage, where so great a variety of human beings from

nearly all regions of the world, with their money or money's worth,

with their hopes and fears, their greed and extravagance, all their

good and evil instincts and faculties at play.

In a few weeks the flags will be furled, the tents struck; the

pontoon-bridge removed; the shops closed; hotels, bazaars, and

churches, all private and public edifices, utterly deserted and

silent; and every house stripped of the last stick of valuable

furniture; every door locked, barred, and sealed; the place left

to take care of itself.

For autumn rains and spring thaws must set in, when the seven or

eight square miles of the ground of the fair, as well as the country

to an immense extent, will be under water.

_THE VOLGA BASIN_

_THE GREAT RIVER--KASAN, TSARITZIN--ASTRAKHAN_

_ANTONIO GALLENGA_

It is hardly possible to travel on the Volga without falling in

love with the great river at first sight.

The range of low hills which we had on our right as we descended

the Oka continued now on the same side as we came down the Volga.

The Volga, however, has nothing of the wild, erratic instincts

of its tributary. It is a grand, calm, dignified stream, keeping

to its course as a respectable matron, and gliding down in placid

loveliness, without weir or leap, fall or rapids, or break of any

kind--a fine, broad, almost unrippled sheet of water, with an even,

steady, and grandly monotonous flow, like that of the stanzas of

Tasso.

Its width, so far as eye can judge, does not greatly exceed that

of the Thames at Gravesend, but it is always the same from the

bridge at Twer above Moscow to the only other bridge, one mile

in length, between Syzran and Samara; everywhere the same "full

bumper" for a run of 2,000 English miles.

Though the Volga is numbered among the European rivers, and has

its sources on the Valdaï hills between the European cities, St.

Petersburg and Moscow, it is a frontier stream, and seemed intended

to form the natural line of demarcation between two parts of the

world--between two worlds.

Up to the middle of the Sixteenth Century, Kasan was the advanced

guard of the Tartar hordes. These wandering tribes, which, profiting

by dissensions among the Russian princes, overcame and overran

all Russia, weakened in their turn by division, fell back from

the main part of the invaded territory, but still held for some

time their own on the Volga, from Kasan to Astrakhan, till they

were utterly routed and brought under Russian sway by Ivan the

Terrible.

Even then, however, though their strength was broken, their spirit

was untamed. The men of high warrior caste who survived their defeat

sought a refuge among their kindred tribes further east, at Samarkand,

Bokhara, and Khiva, where the Russians have now overtaken them; but

a large part of the mere multitude laid aside without giving up

their arms, passively accepted without formally acknowledging the

Tsar's sway, and abided in their tents,--swallowed at once, but

very leisurely digested, by the all-absorbing Russian civilization.

Large bodies of the nation, however, migrated _en masse_ from time

to time, the lands they left vacant being rapidly filled up by

bands of Cossacks, and by foreign (chiefly German), colonists.

For more than three centuries, though already mistress of Siberia

and victorious in remote Asia, Russia proper might be considered as

ending at the Volga; so that most of the older and most important

towns south of Kasan and north of Astrakhan, such as Simbirsk,

Syzran, Volsk, Saratof, Kamyshin, and Tsaritzin, lie on the right,

or Russo-European bank of the stream.

Tsaritzin is at the head of the Delta of the Volga, and it lies 580

versts above Astrakhan, which is said to be at the river's mouth,

but which is still 150 versts from the roadstead or anchorage,

called the Nine Feet Station; the spot on the Caspian where sea

navigation really begins.

At Tsaritzin we might have fancied ourselves in some brand-new

town in one of the remote backwoods of America. It was nothing of

a place before the railway reached it. No one can foretell what

it may become before the locomotive travels past it. For under

present circumstances all the postal service, the light goods and

time-saving passenger traffic from all parts of Russia to Astrakhan,

the Caspian and the Trans-Caspian region, or _vice versâ_, must

pass between the Tsaritzin pier on the Volga and the platforms

of the Tsaritzin railway station.

We did not see much of the upstart town, for the horrible clouds

of thick, dung-impregnated dust would not allow us to keep our

eyes open. But we perceived that almost every trace of what was

once little better than a second rate fortress and a village was

obliterated; the old inhabitants were nowhere, and a bustling set

of new settlers were sharing the broad area among themselves, taking

as much of it as suited their immediate wants, and extending it to

the utmost limits of their sanguine expectations; drawing lines

of streets at great distances, tracing the sides of broad squares

and crescents, and laying the foundations of what would rise in

time into shops and houses, hotels, bazaars, theatres and churches.

Tzaritzin when we saw it was merely the embryo of a city. Those

that may visit it a score of years hence will tell us what they

find it.

Two more nights and a day down the sluggish waters of the main

channel of the Volga landed us on the tenth day after our departure

from Nijni-Novgorod, at Astrakhan, where we stayed a whole week.

From Tsaritzin to Astrakhan the Volga flows through the Steppe,

the great Asiatic grass desert extending from the Caucasus to the

frontier of China. The wild tenants of this wilderness, the various

tribes of Tartars, once the terror of East and West, were like a vast

ocean of human beings swayed to and fro by nomadic and predatory

instincts, which for centuries threatened to overwhelm and efface

every vestige of the world's civilization.

The Russians who were first invested and overpowered by the flood,

were able by the valour and more by the craft of their princes,

first to stem the tide, then to force it back, and in the end to

rear such bulwarks as might for ever baffle its fury, and prevent

its further onset.

Such bulwarks were once the strong places of Kasan and Astrakhan,

the former seats of Tartar hordes, which the Tsars of Moscow made

their bases of operations for the indefinite extension of their

civilized empire over Tartar barbarism.

For the experience of centuries had proved that the Steppe was not

everywhere and altogether an irreclaimable land, nor the Tartars

an utterly untameable race.

Astrakhan, like Kasan, is a Russian town, of whose 50,000 inhabitants

one-fourth or one-fifth at least are tamed Tartars, and the sands

around which can be made to yield grapes and peaches, and a profusion

of melons and watermelons. Beyond the immediate neighbourhood,

over the whole province or "Government" of Astrakhan, stretches

the vast land of the Steppe, the wide and thin pasture-grounds on

which the Tartar tribes roam at will with their flocks; a pastoral

set of men; without fixed homes, and, in our sense of the word,

without laws; and yet perfectly harmless and peaceful--exempt,

at least till very lately, from military service, and only paying

a tribute of 45,000 roubles, at so much a head for each horse,

ox, or camel, ranging over an extent of 7,000,000 dessiatines

(20,000,000 acres) of land, an area of 224,514 kilometers, or about

half of that of France, with a population, including that of the

capital, of 601,514 inhabitants.

Astrakhan is a modern town, with the usual broad, straight streets,

most of them boasting no other pavement than sand, with brick

side-walks, much worn and dilapidated, and, like those of Buenos

Ayres and many other American cities, so raised above the roadway

as to require great attention from those who do not wish to run

the risk of broken shins.

The town has its own Kremlin, apart from the citadel. The Kremlin

is a kind of cathedral-close, with the cathedral and the archbishop's

palace, and several monasteries and priests' habitations. The whole

town, besides, and the environs, as usual in Russia, muster more

churches than they can number priests or worshippers.

In a walk of two or three miles I took outside the town and as

far as the cemeteries, I had a scattered group of at least half

a score of churches all around me, but there was scarcely a human

habitation within sight.

The governor's palace is a low building over a row of shops in the

main square of the city. The square itself and the thoroughfares were

enveloped in thick clouds of blinding dust, almost as troublesome as

that of Tsaritzin; but on the whole, the place is less unclean than

one might expect from a population made up of Russians, Tartars,

Calmucks, Persians, Armenians and Jews.

The Volga and the hundred channels which constitute its delta,

and the northern shores of the Caspian Sea into which they flow,

yield more fish than the coasts of Norway and Newfoundland put

together. The nets employed in catching them would, if laid side

by side on the ground in all their length, extend over a line of

40,000 versts, or twice the distance from St. Petersburg to Tashkend

and back. The annual produce of these Astrakhan fisheries--sturgeon,

sterlet, salmon, pike, shad, etc.--amounts to 10,000,000 puds of

fish (the pud thirty-six English pound weight) of the value of

20,000,000 roubles, the herrings alone yielding a yearly income

of 4,000,000 roubles. With the exception of the caviare, which is

sold all over the world, the produce of these fisheries, salted

or pickled, is destined for home consumption, and travels all over

the empire, although as far as I have been, I have found everywhere

the waters equally well-stocked by nature with every description

of fish; a provident dispensation, since the Russian clergy, like

the Roman Catholic, are indefatigable in their promotion of what

they call "the Apostles' trade," by their injunction of 226 fast

or fish days throughout the year.

The Delta of the Volga and the Caspian Sea lie twenty-five metres

below the level of the Black Sea.

The city of Astrakhan, placed on the left bank of the main channel

of the Delta, and, as I said, 150 versts above its anchorage, becomes

like an island in the midst of a vast sea when the Volga comes down

in its might with the thaw of the northern ice in late spring;

and most of its lowest wards would be overwhelmed were it not for

the dikes that encompass it like a town in Holland.

The eight principal branches and the hundred minor channels and

outlets of the Delta, breaking up the land into a labyrinth of

hundreds of islets, are then blended together in one watery surface,

out of which only the crests of these islets emerge with isolated

villages, with log-huts and long whitewashed buildings, and high-domed

churches, all dammed and diked up like the town itself--Tartar

villages, Calmuck villages, Cossack villages, all or most of them

fishers' homes and fishing establishments--a population of 20,000

to 30,000 souls being thus scattered on the bare sand-hills and

dunes; men of all race, colour, and faith, all employed in the

same fishing pursuit; the Tartars and Calmucks usually as rank

and file, the Russians and other Europeans as overseers, foremen,

and skilled labourers.

From Astrakhan, the queen of the Steppes, to Tiflis the queen of

the Caucasus, we had a choice of routes.

Tourists from England, or from any part of Western Europe, may

easily visit the great mountain-chain on which Prometheus was found,

by crossing the Black Sea from Constantinople or from Odessa, and

landing at Poti, where the Russians have constructed a railway

to Tiflis, once the capital of Georgia, now the residence of the

Governor-General of the whole Caucasus region.

A traveller from the north, bound to the same goal, can take the

train at Moscow, and come down by rail, _via_ Rostov-on-the-Don,

all the way to Vladikavkas, a distance of 1,803 versts; and about

200 additional versts, by post, over a good military road, and

across the main Caucasian chain, will bring him from Vladikavkas

to Tiflis.

But we had descended the Volga, and were now near its mouth. We

had to go down the Volga to the Nine Feet Station below Astrakhan,

embark there on the Caspian Sea, and cross over either to Baku,

whence we could go by post round the mountain-chain at its southern

extremity as far as Tiflis; or land at Petrofsk, and travel along

the chain to Vladikavkas and the good military road across the

chain to Tiflis.

We gave our preference to the last-named route.

We left Astrakhan at ten in the evening on board a heavy barge

belonging to the Caucasus and Mercury steam-navigation company,

towed by a tug down stream at the rate of five or six miles an

hour.

We were all that afternoon and night, and part of the following

day, descending the main channel of the Volga, and it was past

noon before we reached the Nine Feet Station, for so they call

the roadstead above which vessels of more than nine feet draught

dare not venture.

All sight of land, of the seventy larger islands of the Delta,

and even of the minor islets, and of the lowest sand-banks, had

been lost for several hours, and we were here in the open sea,

though scarcely beyond the boundary that the Creator has elsewhere

fixed between land and water. For the Station which, if I can allow

myself an apparent Irishism, is a moveable one, has to be pushed

forward almost day by day as the sands of the Volga silt up far

beyond the choked-up lands of the Delta, encroaching with a steady

inroad on the depths of the waves; the Steppe everywhere widening

as the sea dwindles, and suggesting the thought that the whole

region that is now Steppe must in remote ages have been sea, and

that whatever is now sea, must in time become Steppe.

Indeed, it seems not impossible to calculate how many years or

centuries it may take for the sands of the Volga, aided by those of

the Ural and the Emba on the eastern, and of the Kuma, the Terek,

and the Kur or Kura, with its tributary the Aras, on the western

shore, to fill up the land-locked Caspian, though its extreme depth,

according to the Gazetteers, is 600 feet, and the area covered by

it probably exceeds 180,000 square miles, a surface as large as

that of Spain.

Kasan, once the residence of a redoubted horde, was probably, under

Tartar sway, in a great measure a mere encampment, chiefly a city of

tents; for whatever the guide-books may say, there is no positive

evidence of its present buildings belonging to a date anterior to

the Russian Conquest.

Its situation probably recommended itself to the Tartars chiefly

on the score of strength; for although it stands high above the

river, its present distance from it is at least three miles, and

it is surrounded by a sandy and marshy plain, intersected by the

channels of the Kasana river, erratic water-courses which may have

proved sufficient obstacles to the onset of an invader, but which

raise no less serious hindrances to the conveyance of goods from

the landing-place to the town; an inconvenience hitherto not removed

by the tramway, as it as yet only carries passengers.

Kasan is on the main line of communication between Central Russia

and Siberia.

The travellers bound to that bourne embark here on steamers that go

down the Volga as far as its confluence with the Kama, a tributary

stream, and thence ascend the Kama, which is navigable all the

way to Perm. From Perm a railway runs up to the Pass of the Ural

mountains to Ekaterinenburg, probably to be in course of time continued

to Tiumen, Tobolsk, Tomsk, Irkutsk, the Baikal Lake, the Chinese

frontier at Kiakhta, the banks of the Amoor, and the shores of

the Pacific Ocean.

Along this route it is calculated that some £3,000,000 worth of

merchandise are brought yearly from Siberia down the Kama and up

the Volga to the Nijni-Novgorod fair.

Kasan is a highly flourishing city. It has a population of 90,000

to 100,000 inhabitants, one-fourth of whom are Tartars.

These descendants of the old Nomad race are now here at home, and

live in the city perfectly at peace with their Russian fellow-subjects,

though being Mahometans, they have distinct, if not separate, quarters,

and mosques and a burial-ground of their own. It would seem impossible

for two races which have so little reason for mutual good-will, to

show so little disposition to quarrel. But it should be remembered

that Sclav and Tartar were not in former times so far asunder in

manners, in language, in polish, nor so free from admixture in

blood as the Russians fondly believe.

The town has its Kremlin, on the site of the old citadel, with

its cathedral and other churches, and several "telescope towers,"

if they may be so called, built on several stories, dwindling in

size from floor to floor as they rise one above the other, so that

one can conceive how they might easily sink into one another and

shut up like a spy-glass. The great brick tower of Pier Crescenzi

in Rome is such a tower; and here are many in the same style at

Moscow and in most other old Russian cities. Kasan has several public

edifices of some pretension: the Admiralty; the University--one of

the seven of the Empire, etc. But we had enough of it all after

two or three hours, and were glad to shun the heat of the rest

of the day in the cool sitting-room of Commonen's Hotel, which

alone may be taken as a voucher for the high degree of civilization

reached by Kasan.

We gave even less time to the other cities of the Volga, not thinking

it always worth while to alight at all the stations, though the

steamer stopped at some of these for many a long, weary hour.

With the exception of Kasan, Samara, and Astrakhan, the most important

cities are, as I said, on the right or Russian bank of the River;

and three of them, Syzran, Saratof, and Tsaritzin, are connected

by various railways with Moscow and all the other important centres

of life in the Empire.

The Volga, which between Nijni-Novgorod and Kasan flows in an almost

straight easterly direction, takes a turn to the southward after

leaving Kasan and the confluence of the Kama; but it makes a loop

below Simbirsk, turning eastward to Samara, and again west to Syzran,

after which it resumes its southerly course to Saratof, Tsaritzin,

and Astrakhan.

The railway from Moscow to Syzran, upon reaching Syzran, crosses

the Volga on an iron bridge, one verst and a half, or one English

mile, in length, and high enough to allow the largest steamer pass

without lowering its funnel--a masterpiece of engineering greatly

admired by the people here, who describe it as the longest bridge

in Russia and in the world.

We went under it at midnight by a dim moonlight which barely allowed

us to see it looming in the distance not much bigger than a

telegraph-wire drawn all across the valley, the gossamer line of

the bridge and all the landscape round striking us as dreamlike

and unreal.

After crossing the river the railway proceeds to Samara, and hence

419 versts further to Orenburg, a large and thriving place on the

Ural river, the spot from which the straightest and probably the

shortest way is, or will be, open to all parts of Siberia or Central

Asia; preferable, I should think, to that of Perm and Ekaterinenburg

above-mentioned, which is now the most frequented route.

Beyond Syzran and Samara the river scenery, which has hitherto

been verdant, assumes a southerly aspect; the hill-sides sloping

to the river have a parched and faded brown look; the hill-tops are

bared and seamed with chalky ravines; every trace of the forests

has disappeared; and it is only at rare intervals that the banks

are clad with the verdure of the new growth.

[Illustration: FROM THE RAMPARTS OF THE KREMLIN NIJNI-NOVGOROD.]

From Nijni to Tsaritzin we have stopped at more than thirty different

stations, and no pen could describe the stir and bustle of goods

and passengers that awaited us at every wharf and pier.

Several of these stations are towns of 50,000 to 100,000 inhabitants,

and, besides their corn trade and tobacco, they all deal in some

articles of necessity or luxury, of which they produce enough for

their own, if not always for their neighbours', consumption.

Everywhere one sees huge buildings--steam flour-mills,

tobacco-factories, salt-mines, soap and candle factories, tanneries--and

last, not least, palaces for the sale of _koumiss_ or fermented

mare's milk, a sanitary beverage; and extensive establishments,

especially near Samara, for the _koumiss_ cure,--fashionable resorts

as watering-places, frequented by persons affected by consumption,

and other real or imaginary ailments.

There is something appalling in the thought that all this busy,

and, on the whole, merry life on the banks of the Volga must come

to a dead stand-still for six or seven months in the year. I have

been vainly taxing my brain to guess what may become of the captains,

mates and crews of the 700 steamers, and of the 5,000 heavy barges

with which the river is now swarming; of the porters, agents, clerks,

and other officials at the various stations; of the thousands of

women employed to carry all the firewood from the piers to the

steam-boats. What becomes of all these, and of the men and horses

toiling at the steam-row and tow-boats on the Oka, the Kama, the Don,

the Dnieper, and a hundred other rivers during the long season in

which the vast plains of Russia are turned into a howling wilderness

of snow and ice from end to end?

Railway communication and sledge-driving may, by doubling their

activity, afford employment to some of the men and beasts who would

otherwise be doomed to passive and torpid hybernation. But much of

the work that is practicable in other countries almost throughout

the year--nearly all that is done in the open air--suffers here

grievous interruption.

What should we think in England of a six months' winter, in which

the land were as hard as a rock, in which all the cattle had to

be kept within doors, in which the bricklayer's trowel and the

road-mender's roller had to be laid aside?

And, by way of compensation, what mere human bone and muscle can

stand the crushing labour by which the summer months, with their

long days of twenty hours' sunlight, must make up for the winter's

forced idleness; in a climate too, where, as far as my own experience

goes, the heat is hardly less oppressive and stifling than in the

level lands of Lombardy or the Emilia?

_ODESSA_

_ANTONIO GALLENGA_

From Yalta to Sebastopol there are two routes. One strikes across

the Yaïla hills to Simpheropol, whence we could proceed by rail to

Sebastopol; the other runs along the coast, high up on the hills,

to the Baidar Gate and through the Baidar Valley leading to Balaclava

and the other well-known spots encompassing the ruins of what was

once the great naval station of the Russians on the Black Sea.

We chose the coast route, and travelled for five hours in the afternoon

over forty-eight versts of the most singular road in the world.

It rambles up and down along the side of the hills--as a road did

once on the beautiful Cornice along the Ligurian Riviera--midway

between the upper hill crest and the sea, having on the right the

mountains, a succession of wall-like, perpendicular, hoary cliffs,

between 1,500 feet and 2,000 feet high, a great wall riven into

every variety of fantastic shapes of bastions, towers, and pyramids,

all bare and rugged, crumbling here and there into huge boulders,

strewn along the slopes down to the road, across the road, and

further down to the water-edge, a scene which might befit the

battle-field of the Titans against the gods; and on the left the

wide expanse of the waters, with a coast like a fringe of little

glens and creeks and headlines, and the sun's glitter on the waves

like Dante's "_tremolar della marina_" on the shore of Purgatory.

Between the road and the sea far below us, in the distance, embosomed

in woods still untouched by the autumn frosts, lay the marine villas

of Livadia, Orianda, Alupka, etc., very Edens, where on their first

annexation of the Crimea the wealthy Russians sought a refuge against

the horrors of their wintry climate; more recently, Imperial

residences--Livadia, the darling of the late Emperor; Orianda,

now a mere wreck from the recent conflagration, the seat of the

Grand Duke Constantine; Alupka, the abode of Prince Woronzoff, the

son of the benevolent genius of these districts, the road-maker,

the patron of Yalta, the second founder of Odessa.

A scene of irresistible enchantment is the whole of what the Russians

emphatically call their "southern coast." And, as if to enhance

its charm by contrast, everything changes as you pass the Baidar

Gate, and when you have crossed the Baidar Valley the balmy air

becomes raw and chill, the bald mountains tame and common-place,

and the long descent is through an ashy-gray country, swept over by

an icy blast, saddened by a lowering sky, unrelieved by a flower, a

bush, or a cottage. So marvellous is the power of mere position, so

great the difference between the two sides of the same mountain-wall!

You pass at once from a garden to a steppe.

Away from these sheltering rocks, away from the southern slopes

of the Caucasian ridges, you are in Russia. The only mountains

throughout all the rest of the Tsar's European territories are

the Urals, which nowhere reach even the heights of the Apennines,

which do not form everywhere a continuous chain, and which run in

almost a straight line from north to south. From the icy pole the

wind sweeping over the frozen ocean and the snowy wastes of the

northern provinces finds nowhere a hindrance to its cruel blasts,

and spreads its chill over the whole land with such steady keenness

as to make the climate of the exposed parts of the Black Sea coast

almost as wintry as that of the White Sea. At Odessa in the early

days of October both our hotel and the private houses we had occasion

to enter had already put up double doors and windows, and people

lived in apartments as hermetically closed as if their homes had

been in St. Petersburg.

We slept at Baidar, a Tartar village, where a maiden of that Moslem

race was the only attendant at the Russian inn, and on the morrow

we drove in three hours to Sebastopol, a distance of forty-two

versts.

Sebastopol has still not a little of that Pompeian look which it

bore on the day after its surrender to the Western Allies in 1856.

We drove through miles of ruins, the roofless walls staring at

us from the dismantled doors and windows, the dust from the

rubbish-heaps of brick and mortar blinding us at every turning

of the streets, though, we were told, the city is looking up and

thriving, and both house-rent and building-ground are rising in

price from day to day.

We had to wait two days for the "Olga," detained by stress of weather,

and it was with a hope of enlivening ourselves that, under the

escort of the English Consul, a Crimean veteran who takes care of

the heroic dead, and actually lives with as well as for them, we

drove out to some of the eleven English cemeteries, to the house

where Lord Raglan died, and the monument marking the spot where

"the six hundred rode into the jaws of death"--those localities

made forever memorable by a war than which none was ever undertaken

with less distinct aims, none fought with greater valour, none

brought to an end with less important results.

We left Sebastopol at three in the afternoon in the "Olga," and

landed at Odessa in the morning at ten. Throughout the first week

after our arrival, we never caught a single glimpse of the sun.

Odessa, like Sebastopol, like Kertch, like Astrakhan, and other

places lying on the edge of the Russian Steppe, seems habitually,

under the influence of the wind in peculiar quarters, to be haunted

by fogs that set in at sunrise and only sometimes clear off after

sunset. During this gloomy state of the atmosphere the night is

usually warmer than the day.

[Illustration: PLACE TUREMNAJA ODESSA.]

Odessa has a magnificent position, for it lies high on ravines,

which give it a wide command over its large harbour, lately improved,

as well as on the open sea and coast, the striking feature of the

place being its _boulevard_, a terrace or platform about 500 yards in

length, laid out and planted as a promenade, looking out seawards and

accessible by a flight of stairs of 150 steps from the landing-place.

Odessa is not an old town, but it looks brand-new, for there has

been of late a great deal of building, and the crumbling nature

of the stone keeps the mason and white-washer perpetually at work.

It is lively, though monotonous, for its broad, straight streets

are astir with business, and the rattle of hackney-carriages,

heavy-laden vans, and tramway-cars is incessant. It boasts many

private palaces and has few public edifices, and in its municipal

institutions it is, or used to be, taxed with consulting rather

more the purposes of luxury and ornament than the real wants of

the people or the interests of charity.

Odessa is in Russia, but not of Russia, for among its citizens, we

are told, possibly with exaggeration, more than one-third (70,000)

are Jews, besides 10,000 Greeks and Germans, and Italians in good

number. It is unlike any other Russian city, for it is tolerably

well paved, has plenty of drinking-water, and rows of trees--however

stunted, wind-nipped, and sickly--in every street. It is not Russian,

because few Russians succeed here in business; but strenuous efforts

are made to Russify it, for the names of the streets, which were

once written in Italian as well as in Russian, are now only set up

in Russian, unreadable to most foreign visitors; and the so-called

"Italian Street" (Strada Italiana), reminding one of what the town

owes to its first settlers, has been rebaptized as "Pushkin Street."

Of the three French newspapers which flourished here till very

lately, not one any longer exists, for whatever is not Russian

is discountenanced and tabooed in a town which, in spite of all,

is not and never will be, Russian. French is, nevertheless, more

generally understood than in most Russian cities, but Italian is

dying off here as in all the Levant and the north coast of Africa,

Italy losing as a united nation such hold as she had as a mere

nameless cluster of divided states.

It is difficult to foresee what results the great change that is

visibly going on in the economical and commercial conditions of

the Russian Empire may have on the destinies of Odessa.

Half a century ago, if we may trust the statistics of the _Journal

d' Odessa_, this city had only the third rank among the commercial

places of Russia. At the head of all then was St. Petersburg, whose

harbour was frequented by 1,500 to 2,000 vessels, the exports being

100,000,000 to 120,000,000 roubles, and the imports 140,000,000

to 160,000,000 roubles. Next in importance came Riga, with 1,000

to 1,500 vessels, 35,000,000 to 50,000,000 roubles exports, and

15,000,000 to 20,000,000 roubles imports; and Odessa, as third,

received 600 to 800 vessels, her exports amounting from 25,000,000

to 30,000,000 roubles, and her imports from 20,000,000 to 25,000,000

roubles. The relative commercial importance of the three ports

was, therefore, as twenty-five to six and five.

Matters have undergone a considerable alteration since then. St.

Petersburg, whose imports and exports doubled in amount those of

all the other ports of the Empire put together, has been gradually

declining, the ports of Esthonia, Livonia, and Courland threatening

to deprive her inconvenient harbour of a great part of the Baltic

trade, and the centre of general business being rapidly removed

from the present seat of Government to the old capital, Moscow.

Riga, also, has been and is slowly sinking from its high position

in the Baltic, and may, perhaps, eventually succumb to the active

rivalry of Revel and Libau. Odessa, on the contrary, has been looking

up for these many years, absorbing nearly all the Russian trade in

the Black Sea, and rapidly rising from the third to the second

rank as a seaport.

The main cause of the rise and progress of Odessa was owing to the

development of agricultural enterprise in the provinces of what

is called "Little" and "New Russia," or the "Black Earth Country"

the granary of the Empire and for a long time of all Europe.

Beyond the steppes which encompass the whole southern seacoast of

Russia, from the Sea of Azof to the Danube, there spreads far inland

a fertile region, embracing the whole or part of the Governments

of Podolia, Poltava, Kharkof, Kief, Voronei, Don Cossacks, etc.,

including the districts of what was once known as the "Ukraine,"

which was for many years debatable land between Poland, Turkey,

and Russia, and on which roamed the mongrel bands of the Cossacks,

an uncouth population recruited among the many tramps and vagabonds

from the northern provinces, mixed with all the races of men with

whom they came into contact, settling here and there in new, loose,

and almost lawless communities, organized as military colonies,

and perpetually shifting their allegiance from one to the other

of these three Powers, till the policy and good fortune of Peter

the Great and Catherine II. extended the sway of Russia over the

whole territory.

At the close of the last century, and contemporaneously with the

foundation of Odessa (1794), the bountiful nature of the soil of

this region became known, and the country was overrun by colonists

from "Great" or "Northern Russia," from Germany, and from Bulgaria

and Wallachia; and its rich harvests were soon sufficient, not

only to satisfy, but to exceed the wants of the whole Empire.

Odessa, endowed by its founder, Catherine II., with the privilege

of a free port, which it enjoyed till after the war of the Crimea,

monopolized during that time the export of the produce of this

southern land, consisting chiefly of grain and wool; and its prosperity

went on, always on the increase--affected only temporarily by wars

and bad harvests--to such an extent that the total value of the

exports, which was, in round numbers, about 52,000,000 roubles in

1871, rose to 86,000,000 roubles in 1878, to 88,000,000 roubles

in 1879, and fell, owing to the bad harvest, to 56,000,000 roubles

in 1880.

The Odessa trade was for a long time in the hands of Greek and Italian

merchants, the original settlers in the town at its foundation, the

produce being, before the invention of steamers, conveyed to Italy,

France and England in Italian bottoms. But, of late years, preference

being given to steamers over sailing vessels, and the Italians,

either failing to perceive the value of time and the importance

of the revolution that steam had effected, or lacking capital to

profit by it, allowed the English to have the lion's share of the

Black Sea trade, so that, in 1879, the English vessels entering

the port of Odessa were 549 steamers and four sailing vessels, with

500,000 tons, while the Italians had only fifty steamers and 119

sailing vessels, with 85,700 tons. Next to the English were, in

the same year, the Austrians (eighty-seven steam and 119 sailing

vessels, 119,000 tons). The Russians, at home here, had 150 steam

and eight sailing vessels and 180,000 tons.

Odessa, however, though she had so much of the trade to herself,

had not of late years the whole of it. As the means of land and

water conveyance improved, and especially after the construction of

railways, a number of minor rivals arose all along the coast--Rostov,

at the mouth of the Don; Taganrog, Mariupol or Marianopolis, and

Berdianski, on the north coast of the Sea of Azof, where Greek

colonies are flourishing; Kherson, at the mouth of the Dnieper;

Nicolaief, at the mouth of the Bug; and others. Odessa was thus

reduced to the trade of the region to the west of the last-named

river, having lost that of the provinces of Poltava, Kharkof, Kursk,

Orel, Ekaterinoslaf, etc., and only retaining Kherson, Bessarabia,

Volhynia, Kief, etc., which would still be sufficient for her commercial

well-being.

But Odessa is threatened with a new and far more formidable rival

in Sebastopol. Sebastopol, with all its inlets, is by far the most

perfect harbour in the Black Sea, and has the inestimable advantage

that it never freezes, while in Odessa the ice brings all trade

to a standstill for two or three weeks every winter, and all the

ports of Azof and the mouths of the rivers are frozen from November

to March or even mid-April. Sebastopol has the additional advantage

of being in the most direct and nearest communication by rail with

Kharkof, the very heart of the Black Earth Country, and with Moscow,

the centre of the Russian commercial and industrial business.

The people in Sebastopol have hopes that the Imperial Government,

giving up all thought of bringing back their great Black Sea naval

station from Nicolaief to its former seat, may not be unwilling that

their fine harbour be turned to the purposes of trading enterprise,

and even to favour it for a few years with the privileges of a free

port.

[Illustration: SEBASTOPOL.]

The citizens of Odessa, on the other hand, scout such expectations

as over-sanguine, if not quite chimerical, laugh to scorn the idea

that the Government may at any time lay aside its intention of

going back with its naval establishment to Sebastopol; and, in

that case, they contend that the juxtaposition of a commercial

with an Imperial naval port would be as monstrous a combination

as would be in France that of Marseilles and Toulon, or in England

that of Portsmouth and Liverpool, in one and the same place.

They add that the railway between Moscow and Sebastopol is

ill-constructed and almost breaking down; that, although it is

by some hundred miles shorter than that from Odessa to Moscow,

the express and mail trains are so arranged that the most rapid

communication between north and south is effected between Odessa

and St. Petersburg, which route is travelled over in less than

three days.

Whichever of the contending parties may have the best of the argument,

there is no doubt that, were even the Government to be favourable

to the wishes of the people of Sebastopol, there would be no just

reason for jealousy between the two cities, for Odessa has already

proved that she can manage to grow richer than ever upon one-half

of the trade of Southern Russia, while Sebastopol might safely

rely on carrying on the other half--that other half which is now

already in the hands of Taganrog, Mariupol, Nicolaief, etc. For

all these ports of Azof and the mouths of the rivers, besides being

closed by ice for at least four months in the year, are so shallow

that no amount of dredging can keep back the silting sands, and

vessels must anchor at distances of ten to twenty and even thirty

miles outside the harbours.

_THE DON COSSACKS_

_THOMAS MICHELL_

Coming from the north, the first town of any importance in Southern

Russia is Kursk, three hundred and thirty-five miles from Moscow

in an almost direct line, the railway passing through the cities

of Tula (the Russian Birmingham), and Orel, the centre of a rich

agricultural district connected by rail, on the west, with Riga

on the Baltic, and on the south-east with Tsaritzin on the Volga.

Authentic records attest the existence of Kursk in 1032, and in

1095 it was held by Isiaslaf, son of Vladimir Monomachus, from

whom it passed alternately to the Princes of Chernigof and of

Pereyaslasl. In the Thirteenth Century it was razed to the ground

by the Tartars. In 1586 the southern frontiers of Moscovy were

fortified, and Kursk became one of the principal places on that

line of defence against the Crimean Tartars and the Poles. Its

disasters and sufferings as a military outpost ceased only towards

the end of the Seventeenth Century, after Little Russia (the more

southerly districts watered by the Dnieper), submitted to the Tsar

Alexis.

We are now almost in the heart of the _Chernozem_, or black soil

country, so called from the rich black loam of which its surface

is composed to a depth of two and three yards and more. These vast

plains were known to Herodotus, Strabo, and other ancient geographers

only in their present _Steppe_, or flat and woodless condition. It

is a great relief to the eye to see at last a handsomely-built

city like Kursk, perched, relatively to the surrounding flatness,

on an elevation and almost smothered in the verdure of numerous

gardens. There is, however, not much to see within it, for even the

churches are mostly not older than the second half of the Eighteenth

Century.

The more southerly part of the province of Kursk is in the _Ukraine_,

or ancient border country. Its semi-nomadic population obtained in

early days the designation of Cossacks. This word is not Sclavonic,

but Turkish; and although it long denoted in Russia a free man, or,

rather, a man free to do anything he chose, it had been used by

the Tartar hordes to designate the lower class of their horsemen.

From the princes of the House of Rurik these southerly districts

passed into the possession of Lithuania, and, later, into those of

Poland. Little Russia was another arbitrary name anciently given

to a great part of what has been also known as the Ukraine. No fixed

geographical limits can be assigned to either of these designations,

and especially to the Ukraine of the Poles or the Muscovites; for

as the borders or marshes became safe and populated, they were

absorbed by the dominant power, and ultimately incorporated into

provinces. Little Russia is, in fact, a term now used only to denote

the Southern Russians as distinguished principally from the Great

Russians of the more central part of the empire.

There is a strongly-marked difference in the outward appearance,

the mode of life, and even the cast of thought of these two branches

of the Sclav race. The language of the Little Russian, or _Hohol_, as

he is contemptuously called by his more vigorous northern brother,

is a cross between the Polish and the Russian, although nearer akin

to the Muscovite than to the Polish tongue. Ethnographically, also,

the Little Russians become gradually fused with the White Russians of

the north-west (Mohilef and Vitebsk) and with the Slovaks of the

other side of the Carpathians. The _Malo-Ros_ (Little Russian)

is physically a better, though a less muscular man than the

_Veliko-Ros_, or Great Russian. He is taller, finer-featured, and

less rude and primitive in his domestic surroundings. The women

have both beauty and grace, and make the most of those qualities

by adorning themselves in neat and picturesque costumes, resembling

strongly those of the Roumanian and Transylvanian peasantry. Their

houses are not like those of other parts of Russia--log huts, full,

generally, of vermin and cockroaches; but wattled, thatched, and

whitewashed cottages, surrounded by gardens, and kept internally

in order and cleanliness.

Their lives are altogether more happy, although their songs, full

of deep feeling, and not without a vein of romance are, like those

of all Sclavs, plaintive and in the minor key. The men sing of

the daring exploits of their Cossack forefathers, who were not

free-booters like the old Cossacks of the Volga, but courageous

men engaged in a life-and-death struggle with nomadic hordes, and

later with internal enemies, Poles and rebels. The greater refinement

of the women of Little Russia is attributable to the comparative

ease of their lives in a fertile country, with a climate more genial

than that of the more northerly parts of the empire. There the

Great and the White Russians had to contend with a soil much less

productive, with swamps which had to be drained, with thick forests

which had to be cleared, with wild beasts which had to be destroyed

or guarded against, and with frost and snow that left scarcely

four months in the year for labour in the field.

The upper classes of South Russia, enriched by the cultivation of

large and fertile estates, and favoured in their social development

by long contact with the ancient Western civilization of Poland,

exhibit a similar superiority over the bulk of their compeers in

Great Russia. Except, however, in the case of the larger landed

proprietors, the everyday life of the Southern Russian bears a strong

resemblance to that of the Irish squireen. There is a strong tinge

of the same _insouciance_ as to the material future, and an equal

propensity to reckless hospitality, to sport (principally coursing),

social jollification, and to a great extent to card-playing. Indeed,

there are well-appointed country seats in the South of Russia in

which the long summer days are entirely spent in card-playing, with

interruptions only for meals. There are horses in plenty in the stable,

and vehicles of every description to which they can be harnessed;

but "taking a drive" through endless cornfields along natural roads

or tracks, parched, cracked, and dusty one day, and presenting

the next a surface of black mud, offers but few attractions to the

ladies, and vehicular locomotion is therefore resorted to only

as a matter of necessity, on journeys to estates or towns often

fifty to one hundred miles distant. Country life, indeed, has no

great attractions in any part of Russia Proper, and ever since the

Emancipation of the Serfs and the accompanying extinction of the

power and authority of the proprietary classes, absenteeism has been

largely on the increase, to the advantage solely of the principal

provincial towns, and of certain capitals and watering-places in

Western Europe. Thus, while Kursk and Kharkof owe much of their

riches and progress to the immigration of landed proprietors from

the northerly and eastern districts of the "Black Soil Zone," Kief is

the resort of more princely landlords of the south-western districts,

strongly and favourably affected by Polish culture.

Kharkof, to the east of Kief, is the principal seat of trade in

South Russia, being a centre from which the products and manufactures

of Northern and Central Russia are spread throughout the provinces

to the east and south, down even to the Caucasus.

Sugar, largely produced in this part of Russia from beet-root and

"bounty-fed," and corn, brandy, wool and hides from the central

provinces, are largely sold at the five fairs held each year at

Kharkof, which has also reason to be proud of its university with

upwards of six hundred students, and of its connection by rail with

the shores of the Baltic and those of the Black and Azof Seas.

In 1765, Kharkof became the capital of the Ukraine, after having

been a Cossack outpost town since 1647, when Poland finally ceded

the province to Muscovy. Anciently, this was the camping-ground of

nomadic tribes, particularly of the Khazars, and later the high

road of the Tartar invaders of Russia, whether from the Crimea or

the shores of the Caspian. In the province of Kharkof are found

those remarkable idols of stone which we have seen in the Historical

Museum at Moscow, and a vast number of tumuli, which have yielded

coins establishing the fact of an early intercourse both with Rome

and Arabia.

Poltava, also a place of extensive trade, principally in wool,

horses, and cattle, is familiar to us in connection with the defeat

of Charles XII. by Peter the Great in 1709. The centre of the field

so disastrous to the Swedes is marked by a mound which covers the

remains of their slain. Two monuments commemorate the victory.

At Ekaterinoslaf we are again on the great Dnieper. It was only

a village when Catherine II., descending the river from Kief in a

stately barge accompanied by Joseph II. of Austria, King Stanislaus

Augustus of Poland and a brilliant suite, raised it to the dignity

of a town bearing her own name. On that occasion she laid the first

stone of a cathedral which was not destined to be completed on

the imposing scale she had projected, and which has been reduced

to one-sixth in the edifice that was consecrated only in 1835.

The town consists of only one row of buildings, almost concealed

in gardens and running for nearly three miles parallel with the

Dnieper. Catherine's Palace, a bronze statue which represents her

clad in Roman armour and crowned, and the garden of her magnificent

favourite, Prince Potemkin, constitute the "sights" of Ekaterinoslaf,

the more striking feature of which, however, is its Jewish population,

huddled together in a special quarter between the river and the

bazaar. A considerable number of them pursue the favourite Jewish

occupation of money-changing, and the Ekaterinoslaf Prospekt is

dotted with their stands and their money-chests, painted blue and

red.

A drive over forty miles of Steppe, somewhat relieved in its monotony

by numerous ancient tumuli, bring those who do not proceed by steamer

to the great naval station and commercial port of Nicolaief, at the

junction of the Ingul with the Bug. It was the site until 1775 of

a Cossack _setch_, or fortified settlement, and in 1789 it received

its present appellation in commemoration of the capture of Otchakof

from the Turks on the feast-day of St. Nicholas. Destined from

the first by Potemkin to be the harbour of a Russian fleet in the

Black Sea, temporarily neglected by the naval authorities, Nicolaief

reasserted its claim to that proud position after the fall of

Sebastopol. It owes much of its present affluence to the sound

administration of Admiral Samuel Greig, son of the admiral of Scotch

parentage who, with the aid of some equally gallant countrymen,

won for the Russians the naval battle of Chesmé in 1769. Next to

Odessa, Nicolaief is the handsomest town in New Russia, as this

part of the country was called after its conquest from the Turks

and Tartars. Its large trade, mostly in grain, has been greatly

promoted by the railway, which now connects this important harbour

with Kharkof and other rich agricultural centres.

Of the six ports on the neighbouring Sea of Azof, Taganrog, where

Alexander I. died in 1825, is the most considerable, although steamers

have to anchor at a considerable distance from it, owing to the

shallowness of the roadstead. The annual value of its exports of

corn, wool, tallow, etc., is about five millions sterling, and, as

at Nicolaief, British shipping is chiefly employed in the trade.

Much of the produce shipped here comes from Rostov-on-the-Don, the

chief centre of inland trade in the south-east provinces of Russia,

and one in which many industries (especially the manipulation of tobacco

grown in the Caucasus and the Crimea), are pursued. A short distance

above this great mart is Novocherkask, the capital of the "Country

of the Don Cossacks," anciently the abode of Scythians, Sarmatians,

Huns, Bolgars, Khazars and Tartars. The present population dates

from the Sixteenth Century, when renegades from Muscovy and vagrants

of every description formed themselves into Cossack, or robber

communities. They attacked the Tartars and Turks, and in 1637 took

the Turkish fortress of Azof. Under the reign of Peter the Great

the powerful and independent Cossacks were not much interfered with,

but from 1718 they were gradually brought under subjection to the

Tsar, whom they powerfully assisted in subsequent wars. The town

was founded in 1804, and is adorned with a bronze monument to the

famous Hetman (Ataman or chief) Platof, leader of the Cossacks between

1770 and 1816. It is usual to bestow on the Russian heir-apparent

the title of "Ataman" of the Don Cossacks. The last investiture

with Cossack _bâton_ took place in 1887, when also the reigning

Emperor confirmed, at a "circle," or open-air assemblage, all the

ancient rights and privileges of the warlike Cossacks of the Don.

[Illustration: KHARKOF.]

The chief town of the Kuban district is Ekaterinodar, a name which

signifies, literally, "Catherine's gift," from having been founded

by the sovereign of that name and bestowed, in 1792, together with

the adjacent territory, on the Zaporogian, subsequently known as the

Black Sea Cossacks. Catherine mistrusted their power and influence,

and tempted them to the Kuban with grants of land and other privileges.

The first service of some 20,000 of those new warrior settlers

consisted in barring all egress from the mountains, by means of a

"first fortified line" of stations that extended to Vladikavkas,

where they united with the descendants of the Grebenski Cossacks,

with whom they are not to be confounded. The predominant type amongst

the Zaporogians is still that of the Little Russians, the Grebenski

continuing to preserve their identity with the natives of Great

Russia, whence their origin; and although the whole of this imposing

force, maintained at half a million, has long since adopted the

dress of the Caucasian mountaineers, the Cossacks remain true to

the orthodox faith and to the customs of their forefathers, whose

vernacular tongue has never been forgotten by them. The dress so

universally worn by the male sex, even from boyhood, in all parts

of the Caucasus, consists of a single-breasted garment, like a

frock-coat, but reaching almost to the ankles, tightened in closely

at the waist, with a belt from which are suspended dagger, sword,

and frequently a pistol, and having on either breast a row of ten

or twelve sockets, each of a size to hold a cartridge. A rifle,

which every man possesses, is slung across the back; and a tall

sheep-skin hat finished off at its summit with a piece of coloured

cloth completes the costume.

The number of Cossacks in Transcaucasia being very limited, for

a few only are stationed in each principal town, chiefly as an

escort to the governor of the province, their duties are performed

by _Chapars_, an irregular force, equally dashing horsemen, and

trained in like manner from early youth in those singular exercises

and breakneck evolutions for which the Cossacks of the Caucasus

have become so famous. Setting their horses at full gallop, they

will stand on the saddle and fire all around at an imaginary enemy;

or throw the body completely over to the right, with the left heel

resting on their steed's hind quarter, and fire as if at an enemy

in pursuit, or turn clean round, and sitting astride facing the

horse's tail, keep up a rapid fire. A favourite feat, among many

others, is to throw their hat and rifle to the ground, wheel, and

pick them up whilst going at the horse's fullest speed.

Should the traveller elect to proceed eastward, but north of the

great range, he will meet with the Kabardines, the first amongst the

Circassians to enter into friendly relations with Russia; they are

the "blood" of the Caucasus, a noble race, thoroughly domesticated,

hospitable to strangers, and useful breeders of cattle. To the

south of the Circassians, and occupying about one hundred miles of

the coast in the Black Sea, are the Abkhases, who have enjoyed the

reputation, from time immemorial, of being an indolent and lawless

race, anciently given to piracy, now addicted to thieving when the

opportunity is afforded them, for they are determinedly inimical

to strangers. Their mountains abound in forests of magnificent

walnut and box, where the enthusiastic sportsman will find the

bear, hyena, and wolf, and plenty of smaller game, with seldom a

roof to cover him other than the vault of heaven; but the ordinary

traveller is likely to encounter difficulties and delays that he would

prefer to avoid. Christianity was here introduced by Justinian, who

constructed many churches that would have been notable specimens

of Byzantine architecture, had the Abkhases not destroyed them in

their struggles against the Russians, every such edifice being

occupied and converted by the latter into a military post. One

church, at Pitzunda on the coast, remarkable as being the place

to which John Chrysostom was banished at the instance of Empress

Eudoxia--although the exile never reached his destination--having

escaped the general destruction, has been thoroughly restored of

late years, and is a striking object to passing vessels. Being the

mother church in the Caucasus, Pitzunda, then Pityus, continued to

be the seat of the Catholics of Abkhasia until the Twelfth Century.

Practically, the Abkhases are at present heathens.

Farther south, and extending some way inland from the sea, is the

principality of Mingrelia, where we again tread classic ground,

inasmuch as our wanderings have brought us to the Æa of Circe and

the Argonauts. In a Mingrelian landscape we are struck at the aspect

afforded by the numerous whitewashed cottages as they dot the

well-wooded hills. The Mingrelians, too, like their neighbours

whom we have just quitted, are incurably given to indolence, except

in the making of wine from their abundant vineyards; otherwise they

are content to live on the produce of their orchards, prolific

through the interposition of a beneficent Providence rather than

to any agricultural diligence on their part. They may certainly be

included amongst the handsomest people in Transcaucasia, with their

well-defined features and usually raven black hair. The Dadian, or

prince, is the wealthiest of the dispossessed rulers: the foresight

of his predecessor and his own European training having taught

him the danger of disposing of land and squandering the proceeds,

rather than preserving the property and contenting himself with

a smaller income.

Between Mingrelia and Abkhasia courses the Ingur, and if we ascend

to near its water-shed--a journey easily accomplished on horse-back,

say from Sougdidi, the well-known military station--we should find

ourselves amongst a very wild and singular people, the Svanni,

whose complete subjugation dates back no farther it may be said

than 1876, although they made a formal submission in 1833. They

occupy some forty or fifty miles of the upper valley of the Ingur,

at no part exceeding ten miles in width, and are cut off from all

outside communication between the beginning of September and the

end of May, in consequences of the passes being blocked with snow.

"The scenery in this valley," writes a recent traveller, "is of

great beauty and wildness, and grand beyond description; amid the

most profuse vegetation, every imaginable flower is seen in its

wild state, and bank, meadow, hill-side and grass plot are literally

covered with all that is most lovely; in every forest and grove,

and all undergrowth even, indeed wherever the pure air of heaven

and its divine light is not obstructed, the earth is thus gorgeously

arrayed."

_IN THE CAUCASUS_

_J. BUCHAN TELLER_

Returning to Mingrelia, we find it bounded on the south by the

river Rion, the ancient Phasis, which flows through the country

whence was introduced into Europe the Phasian bird--our pheasant.

The Rion divides Mingrelia from Guria, another principality, where

is situated Batoum, a somewhat pestiferous but important military

station and commercial port, that has tended in no small degree,

since its annexation to Russia in 1878, towards the development

of the resources of this beautiful country, intersected with good

roads through valleys highly cultivated with maize, corn, and barley,

the hills and their declivities being overspread with the oak and

box, exported in large quantities, and yielding handsome returns.

Ozurgheti, the chief town, attractively situated, was the residence

of the rulers who lie interred at the ancient monastery and episcopal

church, Chemokmedy, about six miles distant.

Passengers from Odessa and the Crimea landing at Batoum find the

train in readiness to convey them to Tiflis, the capital of the

whole Transcaucasia, reached in about fifteen hours, the train

travelling slowly enough, but through a land of much interest,

historically and pictorially. On the right, in the distance, are

the highlands of the old kingdom of Armenia, to the left is Imeritia,

a glory, like Mingrelia and Guria, of the past. If so inclined, the

traveller may exchange, at Rion station, the main for a branch line,

which will take him to Kutaïs, the chief town of the old kingdom of

Imeritia, where he may tarry for a while to great advantage. It

is the ancient Khytæa, the residence of Ætes; at any rate a city

of great antiquity, beautifully situated on the banks of the Rion.

Between Kutaïs and Tiflis is the Pass of Suram, at an altitude

of three thousand and twenty-seven feet, over which are laid the

lines of rail by gradients of one in twenty-two feet over a distance

of about eight miles; a triumph of engineering skill due, as is

the entire railway, to British capital and enterprise. Beyond this

Pass the train stops at Gori, situated at the limits of a glorious

plain, watered by the Kur and its tributaries. Since fairly good

accommodation is obtainable, it were well to halt at this station for

the purpose of visiting the unique rock-cut town, Uplytztzykhé, some

eight miles off. Here is a town--there can be no other designation for

it--consisting of public edifices--if such a term may be employed--of

large habitations, presumably for the great, smaller dwellings

for others, each being conveniently divided, and having doorways,

openings for light, and partitions, while many are ornamented with

cornices, mouldings, beams and pillars. The groups are separated

by streets and lanes, and grooves have been cut, unquestionably

for water-courses, and yet the whole has been entirely hewn and

shaped out of the solid rock. Tradition is replete with incidents

in the history of these remarkable excavations, but faithful

historiographers have hitherto refrained from endorsing any of the

tales that have been handed down by romancers of Georgia.

Tiflis, the chief seat of Government and residence of the

Governor-General, having a population of about one hundred thousand

souls, is unpleasantly situated between ranges of perfectly barren

hills, and but for the River Kur, on the banks of which it is built,

would be almost uninhabitable. Having driven through the suburbs

on his way from the railway terminus, the traveller crosses the

Kur over the Woronzoff Bridge, which at once brings him to the

principal street, where he passes in succession the public gardens,

gymnasium, law-courts, palace of the Governor-General, the main

guard-house, public library, museum, etc.; by which time he will

have reached Palace Street and Erivan Square, where are situated

the best hotels and restaurants, and the National Theatre. From the

square three main thoroughfares lead to as many separate quarters,

viz.: the European, where the wealthy live in well-built houses of

elegant construction; the native bazaars, and the marketplace and

Russian bazaar. An extensive view of the city and an interesting

sight is obtained from the eminence crowned by the old fortress

which immediately overlooks the Asiatic quarter and bazaars, whence

rise the confused sounds of human cries and the din from the iron,

brass, and copper-workers. As is the custom elsewhere in the East,

those of one trade congregate together, apart from the other trades,

and so are passed a succession of silversmiths in their stalls,

of furriers, armourers, or eating and wine-shops, the wine of the

country being kept in buffalo, goat, or sheep-skins laid on their

back, and presenting the disagreeable appearance of carcases swollen

after lengthened immersion in water. The Georgians are merry folk,

rarely allowing themselves to be depressed by the troubles of life.

They love wine and music, and ever seek to drive away dull care

by indulging in their favourite Kakhety--two bottles being the

usual allowance to a man's dinner, an allowance, however, greatly

exceeded when, of an evening, friends meet together to join in

the national dance, called the Lezghinka.

The Cathedral of Zion was formerly the church of the Patriarch of

Georgia. It dates from the Fifth Century, and encloses that most

precious relic, with which the nation was converted to Christianity

in the Fourth Century--nothing less than a cross of vine stems bound

with the hair of St. Nina, the patron saint, who first preached the

truth! The patriarchate has long been suppressed, and is replaced

by a Russian Exarch, so that the Georgian Church may be considered

in all respects identical with that of Russia. The palace of the

kings has entirely disappeared, for not a vestige remains. George

XIII. signed his renunciation of the crown in favour of the Emperor

Paul in 1800, and died shortly afterwards amid the execrations of

his subjects, for having ignominiously betrayed them. Many of his

descendants are in the service of Russia, and are the representatives

of one of the most ancient monarchies of the world--for the Bagrations

first rose to power in 587; and if allowance be made for interregnums

it will be found that their reign extended over 1092 years, during

the twelve centuries that elapsed from their earliest election.

As Georgia is the land of wine and song, so is Armenia essentially

the land of legend and tradition, for which must be held in great

part responsible the magnificent mountain that exhibits itself

suddenly at a dip in the road long before the plains are in sight.

Well may the Armenians glory in "their" Ararat, peerless among the

mighty works of the Creator, almost symmetrical in its outlines,

and rising to an altitude of 16,916 feet above the sea, Lesser

Ararat, 12,840 feet, looking almost dwarfed by the side of its mighty

neighbour.

At Erivan, the largest city in Russian Armenia, the traveller will

find fairly good accommodation, but the place is dull enough, whether

in the Persian quarter, where crooked lanes are lined with high walls,

that mask the dwellings within like the defences of a fortress, or

in the broad streets and unpaved quarter laid out by the Russians

since their occupation of the province in 1829, even though enlivened

by a boulevard and gardens fair to look upon. The population is

Armenian and Persian, for Persia ruled here during a considerable

period until vanquished by Russia; but at the bazaar one meets

with other nationalities, such as Tartars from the Steppes, Kurds,

Greeks, and Turkish dealers in search of good horses, upon which

they will fly across the frontier, defying Cossacks and custom

officers alike.

Within a short distance of Erivan, and the post-station nearest

to the Persian frontier, is Nahitchevan, the first abode of Noah

after he came forth from the ark, and probably also his last, since

his tomb is reverently shown by the inhabitants, who eagerly escort

strangers to see it. Other still more important towns in Armenia,

available by carriage-road, are Alexandropol and Kars, the former

being the largest and most powerful fortress and the principal

arsenal in Transcaucasia; the latter, long a Turkish fortress town,

was gallantly defended in 1855 by Sir Fenwick Williams and a few

British officers, until the garrison was starved into surrender

by General Mouravieff. Kars was finally ceded to Russia by the

Treaty of Berlin in 1878.

[Illustration: TIFLIS.]

A Tartar city brought into prominence of late years through the

introduction of railways is Elizavetpol, on the line between Tiflis

and the Caspian, where we must now pick ourselves up after having

retraced our steps from the plains, to journey by rail to dismal

looking Bakù--a town of recent creation, approached through a desert

of sand and stones, where neither vegetable nor animal life can

possibly find an existence. Viewed from the sea, Bakù presents a

distinctly picturesque appearance, with its sombre citadel, numerous

minarets, and the palace of the princes of bygone days towering

above the old town, where the houses look as if they were piled the

one above the other--the new or Russian quarter being at the base,

and lining the shore of the pretty little bay. Modern Bakù contains

some handsome residences and well-paved streets, the principal

being the busy quay, constructed of massive blocks of greystone

masonry, where the naphtha, the wealth of Bakù, is embarked for

transport to the interior of Russia by the Volga, or for conveyance

across the Caspian to Central Asia. Numerous refineries, worth

inspecting, at the west end of Bakù compose the Black Town, so

called from its begrimed condition, and from being ever enveloped

in clouds of the densest smoke. Since a remote period has this

neighbourhood been considered holy by fire-worshippers, because

of the many naphtha springs that were constantly burning, some

even perpetually; indeed, the fires at Surakan, a suburb of Bakù,

continued to be guarded by fire-worshippers from Yezd in Persia,

and even from India, until, with the connivance of the government,

they were hustled away some ten years ago by the increasing number

of speculators engaged in a trade which has now completely driven

out of the market all American produce.

In Daghestan is Gunib, the last stronghold of the brave Shamyl,

whom the strength of Russia was unequal to subdue during the space

of thirty years. "Do the Russians say that they are numerous as

the grains of sand? Then are we the waves that will carry away

that sand," said the great Tartar chief addressing the numerous

tribes who placed themselves under his leadership to repel the

invader. The mountaineers posted themselves on the heights, and,

hidden by trees, shot down their enemies in scores as they advanced

in column up the narrow defiles.

The great thoroughfare between Transcaucasia and Russia is from

Tiflis to Vladikavkaz, the terminus of the Moscow-Rostof railway, by

way of the Dariel road, a stupendous engineering success completed

in the reign of Nicholas. This road winds over a pass 7,977 feet

above the sea, and is kept in repair and clear for traffic in winter

by the Ossets, whose country it traverses, in return for which

service they are exempt from all taxes.

When the traveller will have completed the journey from Tiflis

to Vladikavkaz, he will have arrived at the dépôt and point of

transit for all goods brought by rail from Russia, and there

transferred, for conveyance to the Transcaucasian provinces, to

clumsy, unwieldly carts or vans drawn by horses or oxen; those in

charge of the caravans never being in a hurry, completely indifferent

as to when they start, or when they arrive at their destination,

and rejoicing in a lengthened stay at Mlety station, after having

accomplished the most tiresome part of the distance--the ascent and

descent of the pass. Vladikavkaz was founded in 1785 on the site

of an Osset village, and became the headquarters and chief military

dépôt of the Russians during their lengthened struggle for supremacy

with the stout-hearted hillmen; it is now the chief town and seat

of government for the province of Kuban, and still an important

military station. The population is made up of Circassians, Armenians,

and Russians, and a few Ossets at the bazaars, for the natives made

off long ago. The chief industries are the manufacture of silver

and gold lace, arms, _burkas_, the Caucasian's all-weathers cloak,

silver ornaments, etc. The hotels are fairly good, but there being

nothing at Vladikavkaz itself sufficiently inviting to encourage

a longer stay than is absolutely necessary, the following choice

of routes lays before the stranger. He may post through Eastern

Caucasus and embark at Petrovsk for Astrakhan and the tedious voyage

up the Volga; or take the railway to Rostof _en route_ to Moscow; or

travel by rail to Novorossisk on the Black Sea, and there embark;

or, following that line as far as Ekaterinodar, post thence to

Taman and cross the straits to Kertch.

_KHIVA_

_FRED BURNABY_

We were now fast nearing Khiva, which could be just discerned in

the distance, but was hidden, to a certain extent, from our view by

a narrow belt of tall, graceful trees; however, some richly-painted

minarets and high domes of coloured tiles could be seen towering

above the leafy groves. Orchards surrounded by walls eight and ten

feet high, continually met the gaze, and avenues of mulberry-trees

studded the landscape in all directions.