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THE ASCENT OF TETNULD 263
say in the Caucasus— the horses did not come till past noon,
and it had loncj been dark when we all reassembled in the court-
house at Ipari. Half the party came by the Ingur, the others by
Mestia and the Uguir Pass. The former route is considerably
the shorter. The path from Ipari to Adish, a three hours' ride, is
most romantic. Fancy the Valley of the Lyn
with two mountains
of over fifteen thousand feet closing every vista, the white pyramid
of Tetnuld in front, the rock-towers of Ushba behind. One
of the views of Ushba was the most perfect iinaginable. But there
The particular charm of
ai'e so many perfect views of Ushba !
this was in the water, and the foliage of the foreground, and the
way in which the lower hills formed a framework for the great
peaks. The path continues by —and often in— the stream until
the barley-fields and towers of Adish come suddenly in sight.
Adish, as I have before pointed out, is the most isolated,
and one of the wildest of the connnunes of Free Suanetia. It
has no priest or headman :
but
in 1865 the villagers arc said to
have been formally baptized ; they are certainly still unre-
generate, and utter barbarians in their manner of dealing with
strangers. But, strong in our escort of two Cossacks,* we had no
fear of the inhabitants, and made our mid-day halt in an enclosure
at the top of the village. High prices were asked for provisions,
and the villagers quarrelled noisily among themselves as to the
distribution of the money, or invented grounds for petty demands,
which they pressed on us with noisy persistence. Compared,
however, to our encounters in 1868, this appeared to me but
a poor perfoi'mance. Violence of tone and gesture are conventional
in Suanetia : there was no real passion. We scattered smiles
and kopeks in retui'n for a sheep and other ^^I'ovisions. One man
demanded paymetit on the ground that we had lunched on his
land, and on being laughed at had recourse to the traditional
pantomime of fetching his gun ; another laid hold of my ice-axe,
' The reader must be reminded tbat, in records of Caucasian travel,
a Cossack is not an
ethnographical but a niiliuiry term. The two men we had with us on this occasion were one
a Suanetian, the other a Kabardan from Naltshik.
'
'
The surveyor's Cossack at Kiiraul was a
Tauli. JIany of the Cossacks, both men and officers, are Ossetes.