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82 THE EXTLOPxATION OF TTIE CAUCASUS
in the morning sunshine, and the snows rise slowly behind it along
the horizon, until from end to end, not in a continuous line, but in
clustered companies, the silver sjiearheads of the guardians of Asia
gather against the southern sky. The train makes a halt at the
'
Mineral Waters '
station, where a crowd of omnibus and '
phaeton '
drivers, eager for passengers for Piatigorsk, used to seem out of
character with the desolate landscape which formed their environ-
ment. Then, as it approaches the base of the hills, the line
swerves eastwards. The foreground resembles in its undulations
rather the rolling uplands of Bavaria than the dead level of the
Lombard plain. We cross formidable streams, the tributaries of
the Terek, running between high banks, and half hidden in dense
jungle, the home of the wild boar. After one glance
at their
grey, turbid waters, the mountaineer needs no further proof of
the existence of great glaciers
in the Caucasus. That professed
'
scientists '
should have been unable to
interpret so obvious a
natural indication is hardly creditable to their powers of observa-
tion or of inference.
On the right, the twin cones of Elbruz become more and more
conspicuous. Slowly the western disappears, and the mountain
assumes the simple lines of a typical volcano, a heavier and less
graceful Fuji-san. There are no towns or roads in the foreground.
Sometimes the train passes near the low cottages of a moated
Cossack village, ranged in regular lines round a church, the white
walls and green cupola of which remain visible for miles. Each
hamlet is suiTounded by sunflower-fields and ploughlands, a little
oasis in the wilderness of
pale weeds and waving grasses and broad
muddy places where carts pass, which Piussians call roads. We
are here skirting the old military march, held till forty years ago
by the Cossacks moved down from the Don in the last century to
form a bulwark against the robber-tribes of the mountains. Their
look-out jiosts have not all foUen to ruin ; one may still see the
pigeon-houses or sentry-boxes on stilts from which they kept guard
over the fords of the rivers, and gave notice of the approach of
the marauders, who were ever lurking among the forests of the
foot-hills. The border life which by its I'omance and adventure