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THE PATHS TO SUANETIA 193
nowhere attain a height of more than 8000 to 9000 feet. The
traveller accustomed to the Alps is ama/.ed at the (juantity of
snow and ice that clings even to the steepest parts of the range,
the swelling bosses of glacier, the thick folds of snow that drape
the mountain forms. The frozen cascade of the Adish Glacier
is uni([ue among ice-falls, and, when the sun shines on its towers
and caverns, gleams
almost an ideal mountain :
with the most varied colours. Tetnuld is
the snowy face the Grivola turns to
Val d'Aosta is a miniature repi'oduction of it, but Tetnuld is a
Grivola higher than Mont Blanc.
There is more to be seen from the Latpari Pass. Turning
west we overlook the labyrinth of green hills and glens, the forests
and pastures and corn-lands of Free Suanetia. It is ringed by a
high distant range of gi'anite domes and spires, between which
long glaciers, like white ladders, lead the eye skywards. For
the present, to quote M. Levier :
'
I will avoid any minute
enumeration of the points, pyramids, needles, crests, combs, ridges,
cols, the line of which develops itself before the astonished gaze.'
This lively botanist goes on to apologise to '
omission of a '
Alpinists
'
for his
learned catalogue bristling with exact names for
summits whose nomenclature is still undetermined.' We no more
expected it of him than he would thank us for cataloguing the
flora and inventing barbarous names for newly-recognised species.
Each explorer has his own task. That of surveyors and dis-
coverers is to establish names for mountains, as that of botanists is
to find them for plants. But the proper place for a catalogue
is an AppLMidix, and for the moment I spare my readers.
One object on the horizon, a golden mass, the colour of wliich
tells of the greater depth of atmosphere through which it is seen,
must, however, be named. The double crest of Elbruz is unmistak-
able. Farther to the right stand two great rock-towers, linked, like
those of a Gothic cathedral, by a lofty screen. These are Ushba,
the Storm-peak, the tutelary mountain of Suanetia. The broad
snows of Dongusorun and the horn of Shtavler, the summit between
the valleys of the Nakra and the Nenskra, appear
fai'ther to
the left. As we descend, following a terrace along a projecting
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