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