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THE MAMISON PASS AND GEKI 105
let it tall to ruin seems to us Western Europeans had ecouoniy.
Not so, however, to Russians. Throughout the Empire the tradition
of road-making is absent. The national road is a track deep in dust
or mud, and barely passable, except when sledges supersede wheels.
The stamp of Russian road-work is its imperfection. In the
Caucasus, where so much work of this kind has been called for, the
peculiarity is conspicuous. With prodigious effort, and at enormous
expense — it is said £4,000,000, or more than five times the cost of
the Simplon to Napoleon — the Pass of the Caucasus has, indeed,
been brought to a condition equal to that of Alpine highroads.
A Swiss canton or an Italian commune looks after its contractors
verv difterentlv. But the Mamison Road remains in part an un-
metalled track, liable to be broken by every winter snowfall or
summer rainstorm. On the Klukhor Road, the bridges are built
only to be carried away or disregarded altogether by a playful
stream, which waits until they are finished, and then either sweeps
the whole structure down to the Black Sea or adopts a new channel
a few yax'ds away, leaving the arches high and dry. The visitor
who drives eastward along the coast from Sukhum Kale soon finds,
like lo, his road barred by a violent torrent, and his horses forced
out to sea to ford it by the bar.
To return to the Mamison. Where a commercial highway ought
to exist and to be maintained, a track has been secured which, at
any sudden emergency, a few regiments might I'ender practicable,
without any great delay, for troops and artillery. In the mean-
time it furnishes mountaineers with a convenient approach to the
chain; and it can be recommended to travellers who are not in
a hurry and can afford to run the risk of finding the I'oad
interrupted, and no relay of horses or vehicles procurable beyond
the break.
In variety of scenery the Mamison Road, in my opinion, far
surpasses the more famous Pass of the Caucasus. Tiiere may
be nothing so horrid,
' — so duris cautihus
as a last-century traveller would have said,
horrens,' in — Virgil's phrase as the Darial
defile, no single view so strangely impressive as the glimpse of
Kasbek from the post-station of the same name. But the Kassara