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BALKAR AND BEZINGI 169
To make an early start in the Caucasus you must get your men
away from villages and into camp.
The traveller bound for the glaciers at the head of the valley
soon leaves the level cornfields of Balkar. The scenery again
undergoes one of those startling transformations peculiar
to the
Caucasus. The bare, rounded, cr^-stalline schists are left behind ;
we enter the great trough which divides the granite of Kosh-
tantau from the granite of the Bogkhobashi range. Grey cliff's,
TlIK CllKKKK VALLEY AND FVTNAK(;YX
the foundations of the mountains, rise too steeply for the summits
close behind them to be visible. Pines cluster on the rocky shelves.
The path is alternately a terrace on the face of the cliffs or tra-
verses the fan-shaped screes brought down by lateral torrents.
The scenery is more Alpine in its character than is common in
this region : it may remind an Oberlander of the approach to the
Grimsel : the fine snow-crest of Fytnargyn, used as a panoramic
point by Signor Sella, closes the vista. A roaring glacier stream, the
Tiutiunsu-— (Smoking-water, we were told, the word means) — bursts
out of a wooded gorge on the right.
It comes from the very