THE GORGE OF DARIEL
LIVING in towns is enervating; it starves both gods and devils. There
the half-gods of wit and conversation hold sway. One morning I put a
sovereign in my pocket, slung my travelling bed over my shoulder, and
resolved to see more of the mountains. The sovereign was in small
change.
It was a dull, showery day, and the green trees clung to the mountain
sides like soft plumage. I walked the whole day along the Georgian road
and met no more than two people beyond the little crowd packed into the
stage-coach. In the afternoon I entered the _débris_ of Larse, where the
famous road enters the great mountains, and I slept in the post-station
within sight of the great Ermolovsky stone, famous for its size, and for
a Russian poem which it inspired.
Next morning I felt that my journey had begun. For I was at the mouth of
the Dariel Gorge. Two versts from the station was the little red bridge
which clasps together the great rocks on either bank of the Terek. They
call it, as was, I suppose, almost inevitable, the Devil’s Bridge, and
it looks enchanted. It is overhung by gigantic cliffs, the great walls
of the corridor of the gorge. The river which rushes underneath is
something incomparably stronger than the bridge itself; it is a monster
wallowing, plunging, roaring, thundering, lifting up a hundred dirty
heads. No horse or man would stand a chance in its current; even the
great glacial boulders, weighing tons, are rolled over and over by its
waves, and, shutting one’s eyes, one listens to an uproar as of the
heaviest streetful of traffic on Cheapside.
I think May is the best time to see the gorge, of a morning at dawn. I
was there before the sun had risen. It was then indeed what a Russian
has called it, “A fairy tale in twelve versts.” There is little verdure
there except the grass, but the tops of the cliffs are snow-crested, and
just below the snow one sees, far away, the hoar-frosted tops of woods.
Below that are two or three thousand feet of rock, brown with withered
grass, but brightened here and there by the greenest fir trees. At the
base the tortured rock seems wrought in cyphers and frescoes, all
twisted and lined as if a great history had been told in hieroglyphics
and letters that only some past civilisation had been able to
understand. But, as someone has said, “Odin has engraved runes upon all
visible things—a divine alphabet intelligible only to the thinking
spirit.”
The cliffs are crowned here and there by the ruins of old towers, and
the castle of Queen Tamara still stands, a grim survival from the
twelfth century when many crimes were accomplished there. One still sees
the stairway in the rock along which unfortunate victims used to be
taken to be hurled into the foaming river. Even below the ruins the
clefts hold snow, and one sees a rivulet of snow and ice descending to
become a cascade of bright water. From the river to the sky the whole is
harmonised by moss and lichen and ancient greyness. It is a place where
the stupendous majesty of Nature troubles the soul, where one feels
oppressed by the immanence of powers greater than oneself, where one
knows in one’s heart how small and feeble is the little earth-born
creature Man beside those powers which have fashioned the Universe and
which move in the fir-hearts of worlds.
I sat on a stone and looked up. The perfectly blue sky was spread across
like a roof. The sun had risen, but would not shine in upon me for
hours. Meanwhile I watched the light descending from the mountains, and
the sharp shadow picture of the rocks on my side thrown on the rocks of
the other. The shadow was gradually climbing down.
How clearly all sounds can be distinguished there! The rocks preserve
even the whisper. I notice that when one comes out of the open into the
shelter of a gorge all sounds are trebled in volume and in distinctness.
One becomes aware of the music of the wind, the roar of the distant
torrent; even the little rivulets trickling down from the snow-drifts
have a voice that reaches the ear. The waterfalls have two voices, the
first a roar, and the second which the listener hears as a secret
treble.
I walked on uphill past the boundary line into Trans-Caucasia, past the
Government fort and the first free wine-inn of the new territory—the
Russians have allowed the vodka monopoly to lapse in Trans-Caucasia—and
came to the Devdorak glacier with its long file of snow and ice. Here
there was a large pile of snow on the road, hard, firm snow six feet
deep. It had dropped from the heights. I walked on top of it, and it was
so hard that I did not even make foot-prints. A man would stand a bad
chance against a falling drift.
At Devdorak is the Alexandrovsky Bridge, and I crossed the Terek once
more and came to the sunny side of the gorge. A hot sun shone and a
bracing wind rushed round the corners of the serpentine road.
Butterflies purple and brown disported themselves, and where the water
oozed through the porphyry the rocks were festooned with flowers.
[Illustration: DARIEL GORGE: CASTLE OF QUEEN TAMARA AND RUSSIAN
FORTRESS]
------------------------------------------------------------------------