Untitled

:« THE EXI'LUUATIOX OF THE CAUCASUS
indistinct, but perpetual murmur of falling torrents, and the
momentary roar of avalanches as they plunge from the frozen cliffs
of neve underfoot into the hidden depths of the glaciei's. The vast
blue landscape, some 500 miles in diameter, outspread beneath, is
spanned by a lii-oad belt of snowy heights and hollows, as the sky
is arched at night by the Milky Way. These heights do not show
as the single wall indicated on maps, but rather as a system of short
crests, running generally at an acute angle
to the direction of the
chain, and more nearly due east and west. We can distinguish
generally two (sometimes more) principal ridges roughly parallel.
The peaks are encased in frosty armour, full of subtle lines and
delicate
flutings, where the corniced crests throw their bands
of shadow on to the broad breastplate of snow. Below the
Bergschrund, or lissure that belts the mountain sides, heavy folds
of stainless neve fall to the lower glaciers. Where the crags are
bare they show the boldness and I'igidity of outline characteristic of
the harder crystalline rocks. In the Central Ciroup, round Shkara,
Koshtantau, and Dykhtau, the forces, whatever they were, that gave
the chain its being, seem to have been most strenuously exerted :
the crests are higher, the slopes steeper, the trenches more profound.
There is a vigour, an extravagance, one might say, in the mountam
structure that may recall the Alps of Dauphine/
The hollows between the heights are filled by enormous iirths of
ice, whose basins stretch out parallel to the crests, snowfield beyond
snowfield, on a scale hardly found in the Alps except at the bases
of the Jungfrau and the Finsteraarhorn." From the 'dusky doors'
of the glaciers rivers flash, full-grown, into life, and our eyes follow
their course in either direction, north or south, as they linger for a
time in broad forest basins or grassy trenches at the foot of the
snows, and gather their tributaries before battling a way out through
deep ravines and a maze of foothills to the distant steppe or the
dim surface of the Black Sea. What is the character of the country
' The Bezingi Glacier is a geological museum of fragments of crystalline rocks fallen from
the neighbouring ranges, as curious to the eyes as obnoxious to the soles of those who tramp up
this magnificent ice-stream.
- The Aletscli Glacier is longer than any glacier in the Caucasus. But the Bezingi and
Karagom are little inferior to any other glacier in the Alps.