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24 THE EXPLORATION OF THE CAUCASUS<br />
It would be very ungrateful to leave out in this enumei'ation of<br />
the contributors to our accurate knowledge of the Central Caucasus<br />
the Eussian engineers who have been charged with the mapping<br />
of the chain.<br />
About 1880 an entirely new survey of the Caucasian Provinces<br />
was undertaken by the Government. I had, in 1889, opportunities<br />
of making the personal acquaintance of two of the officials— they<br />
belong to a civil and not a military service— entrusted with this<br />
task, Messieui's Jukolf and Bogdanoff, and of appreciating on the<br />
spot their zeal and patience. Another of the surveyors, M.<br />
Kovtoradze, distinguished himself in 1891 by following Mr. Holder's<br />
party to the top of Ada! Khokh. Elbruz had been reached in 1890<br />
by M. Pastukhoff, of the Survey, and Kasbek was in 1889 climbed<br />
by a resident at Tiflis, who had the boldness to describe his<br />
expedition as the 'first authentic ascent of the mountain.'<br />
As a whole, the new survey promises to be excellent. Some of<br />
the earlier sheets have not as yet been brought up to the general<br />
level. The surveyors went from one extreme to the other : they<br />
exaggerated at first, almost as much as their predecessors had<br />
diminished, the extent of the snows ; no attention to<br />
they jjaid<br />
the spurs that subdivide the glacier basins. But in the more<br />
recent, and by far the larger portion of their work, this tendency<br />
has di.sappeared. There is little fault to be found with most of<br />
the sheets placed in my hands by the courtesy of General Kulberg.<br />
Here and there, perhaps, some glacier recess, invisible from any<br />
valley, and only accessible by dint of ice-axes, has been vaguel}and<br />
inadequately depicted. In all such cases I have ventured,<br />
in the map issued with these volumes, to make, as far as the<br />
scale allows, what seem to me the necessary corrections.<br />
Of the predecessor of this map, a large diagram I prepared with<br />
no sUght labour ten years ago for the Geographical Society, I<br />
wrote at the time as follows :—<br />
'Tlic sketch iiiaji shown, thou^'h in sonic ])arts without pretensions to<br />
scientitic accuracy, gives a fairly truthful rejjrescntation of the heart of the<br />
Caucasus. It indicates the complex character of the snowy chain, its<br />
numerous spurs, how the glacier basins are distributed, how the ridges