Untitled

THE ADAl KlloKII GROUP 127
iiuiiiy of the ('harms of Suanetia, though
all on a smaller scale.
Glorious forests, in which lofty, smooth-stemmed beeches mingle
with the dark cones of gigantic })ines — jiines that are to those
of the Alps what Salisbury spire is to a village steeple — clothe the
river banks. Rolling downs, fringed with birch-groves and carpeted
with flowers, spread along the base of the frosty chain, itself a
succession of bold buttresses, snow-peaks, and tumbling bays of
ice. But there is no Ushba behind Gebi, and tlie southern summits
of Adai Khokh are 2000 feet lower than the giants that overhang
the sources of the Ingur.
On the north side the upper valley of the Urukh, parallel
with the stern
to the main chain, is picturesque in comparison
troughs up which the mists course before they gather
round the
feet of Dykhtau and Koshtantau. The scenery of the Zea valley
is unicjue in the northern Caucasus in its rich variety of foliage
and romantic wildness. The great glaciers, the Karagom and Zea,
end under bristling I'ock-peaks and among luxuriant forests.
The upper snowfields of the Karagom produce an overwhelming-
impression of vastness and pui'ity, difi'erent from, but not inferior
to, the effect of the stupendous and apparently perpendicular
mountain-walls that confine within naiinwer limits tlie sources of
the Bezingi Glacier. The Adai Khokh grouji has been called the
Monte Rosa of the Caucasus, and in some details the comparison
may hold good, but I should prefer to Oberland— an Oberlaud with
it compare to the Bernese
the points of the compass reversed
and its Aletsch Glacier, a little below the '
Place de la Concorde,'
plunging suddenly in an ice-fall as high as that of the Ober
Grindelwald Glacier towards the fields and forests.
It would be easy, at this point, to encumber several pages
with a laboriously compiled statement of orographical facts, to
point out the exact position of the chief ridges and their relations
to the great snowfields. But all this information can be better
procured by those who care for it from the map, where it is,
in my judgment, in its jiroper place. To decompose a niaj) is a
short way of making an article appear solid, much favoured by
a class of Continental writers who pretend to be scientific, and