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PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
In these volumes I have endeavoured to bring together much
material previously scattered and difficult of access to the public.
It has been my object to make my chapters
such a series of
sketches of the Central Caucasus, its scenery and its people,
cis may stir pleasurable memories, or anticipations among travellers,
and also interest that great body of readers who love mountains
and like to hear about their exploration. The arrangement of
the book is in the main topographical :
that
is to say,
I have
abandoned chronological order and continuity in the narrative of
particular journeys in order to bring together the facts concerning
each district, or portion of the chain, into single, or consecutive,
chapters. The method has its drawbacks ; but on the whole these
have seemed to me in the present instance to be more than counter-
balanced by its advantages. The record of adventure may be less
vivid, but the pictures of the country and its people should gain
in definiteness, and it ought to be easier to select characteristic
facts from among trivial details.
The Appendix records every New Expedition which had
come to my knowledge at the date of its compilation.
body of the work I seem to myself to have given
space to my own doings.
In the
too much
If I have erred in this flirection, it
has been partly in order to preserve some literary unity, partly
because I have travelled in the country more widely and at
longer intervals of time than most of my countrymen. In the
course of three journeys — in I RGB and again in 1887 and 1889