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140 THE EXPLORATION OF THE CAUCASUS
of glacier air and milk diet. His servants had gone down to
the villages, two hours' distant, for provisions.
The scenery throughout the descent had hitherto been of the
most stern magnificence. The Zea Glacier rolls its billowy flood
between rocky walls and spires hung with fantastic, frozen draperies.
But the most charming hours and landscapes of the day were still
before us. The valley we wei'e entering is one of the few northern
glens of the Central Caucasus which are wooded to their heights.
Overhead shot up crags like the Engelhorner of Rosenlaui,
but granite in place of limestone ; a second great glacier poured
in a broad sheet from a recess in the right-hand range. The
foreground was occupied by a forest of beech, birch, and fir, with
an undergrowth of laurels, golden azaleas, cream rhododendrons,
and roses— not Alpcnrosen, but single wild-roses. That evening
walk, the gleam of the white and blu.sh roses under the forest
trees, the faint delicate colours of the tall mallows and Canterbury
bells on the open glades, the fragrance of the fading azaleas,
live among the most vivid of my Caucasian day-dreams. There
was hardly a track- through the wood until we came suddenly
on the ancient and famous shrine of Itekom, a place of pilgrimage
from time immemorial for all the country side. On a little
clearing stands a low wooden building about the shape and size
of an ordinary Alpine chalet or hay-barn. The logs
of which
it is constructed are unsmoothed, and the only external ornament
is some curious carving on the projecting beams of the roof The
interior is now ruinous, and contains nothing but a few sacred
pictures in decay, heaj^s of iron arrowheads, and piles of bones of the
Caucasian ibex {Mgoceros Pallasii)? In ancient times it is reported
that many oflTerings were made by the devout, but since the
Russian occupation any one has been allowed to exchange the old
Mr. Clive Phillipps-WoUey, the author of Savage Svdnetia and editor of the '
'
Big Game
volume in the Badniinton Series, kindly supplies
the following note :—
'I make no pretension to being more than an unscientific field naturalist. But in what I
say about the tur, I have, I believe, the authority of Dr. Radde, the curator of the Tiflis
Museum, as well as my own opinion. Tiie iur is not the steinhoch, which I take to be the
German for ibex. The tar {Capra caucasica) has the horns thrown out laterally from the
head instead of being crossed right back towards the quarters as in the ibex. There are, Dr.
Kadde holds, two varieties of tlie (!() in the Caucasus, chiefly distinguishable by their horns,