Untitled

136 THE EXPLORATION OF THE CAUCASUS
he gained the top of a double peak. Questions have been raised
in his own and others' minds as to which summit he ascended,
but after very careful consideration of all the evidence contained
in M. de Ddchy's narrative and Mr. Woolley's photogi'aphs, I feel
very little doubt that he attained the peak he aimed at.
In Petermann's Mitteilungen (1889, Heft 9), M. de D^chy
scale of the Zea Glacier. His carto-
published a map on a large
grapher, with excellent intentions— for it is a hard thing to persuade
cartographers that a Government Survey may be worse than useless
for the latter
— tried to extend it to the Karagom Glacier, using
the five-verst map. Not unnaturally the result was most un-
satisfactory. There was obviously 'something wrong somewhere.'
We have now, I believe, found out w^here.
From officers of the Topographical Bureau at Tiflis— whose
invariable courtesy to foreigners and readiness to communicate all
scientific information relating to the Caucasus call for my warmest
acknowledgment — I obtained the points from which the triangulation
of the Adai Khokh of the five-verst map —made in the
Fifties—was taken, and found that they were very distant points.
Obviously General Chodzko and his surveyors had triangulated
the highest peak of the group from afar, and on nearer approach
had wrongly identified the summits, and distorted their topography
in order to I'econcile them. The Adai Khokh Group resembles, as
I have pointed out, in several respects the Oberland ; the Karagom
corresponding roughly to the Aletsch Glacier. What had happened
was equivalent to the Finsteraarhorn having been triangulated from
Bern, and the Schreckhorn or Eiger wrongly identified with it in
filling in the topography.
still remained to be discovered.
But the Finsteraarhorn of the Caucasus
It was not until 1887 that, as has been described in the last
chapter, when half-way up Shoda, the isolated peak south of Gebi, I
saw once more the Adai Khokh Group, and looked over our old pass
to the mountains that encircle the Karagom Glacier. There, sure
enough, was the peak I wanted. There were indeed two mountains ;
a rock-peak with two blunt heads, close behind the double snow-
peak of the Rion, and, farther back, a long comb of snow and ice on