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50 THE EXPLORATION OF THE CAUCASUS
trunks which fall everywhei'e, and slowly get buried after having
yielded life to innumerable epiphytes, large and small, ferns, mosses,
lichens and fungi. Something quite analogous to this burying of
dead trees in the forest goes on in the mountain meadows, w^here
the masses of giant plants,
left to themselves and seldom ti'ampled
by herds, droop in the fall of the year and give back to the
ground the elements of their future renewal.
' No matter how rich a soil may be, however, it can never
lengthen the stem of a cornflower, a poppy, or a tulip, beyond a
certain limit. Something more is needed to exjslain the exti'aordinaiy
height of these monkshoods, cephalaria, mulgedia, and
groundsels of the Caucasus, among which men on horseback might
play at hide and seek without stooping, as among the cardoons
[Cynara cardunculus) of La Plata. These gigantic dimensions date
neither from yesterday nor from a thousand years ago, but are a
legacy, an inheritance, of still earlier times. We are really dealing
with survivals of the giant flora of past ages, of which a certain
number of characteristic species have been preserved, owing to
specially favourable conditions of soil and climate. These ancients
of the Earth— if the expression may be — pei-raitted are the true
indigenes, and determine the chai-acter of the accidental intruders
who have come amongst them. It would make a most attrac-
tive subject for research to determine exactly the number of
these veterans and their mode of association, to study them
from one end of the chain to the other, and to distinguish
what are the essential and what the accidental elements of the
The great screen of forests, spread along
the outer northern
flank of the chain, has been less frequently described. The steppe,
except in the sunk river-beds or round the villages, is treeless ;
but no sooner does the ground begin to rise than wild fruit-
trees appear, soon to be succeeded by dense groves of beeches.
Azalea and rhododendron— the common lilac vai'iety {iwnticxmi) —
flourish under their shade. The glades are bright in summer
with millions of golden flowers, probably the Telekia speciosa,
which the ordinary traveller may easily mistake, as I did at