Among the Russians(63)

I found myself driving beside a tributary of the Terek, past shallow floods and stranded trees. A few people were sitting on its banks in the drizzle, cooking shashlik on camp-fires. Then the road steepened into the wild. Crags and ridges reeled in and out of cloud, which spurted between their gulleys as if the whole land were on fire. The shoulders of the truncated mountains came barging into the river, their rock-faces grey as the rain, or poured in gentler slants under a deciduous gush of trees. Sometimes, hung with clinging outcrops of shrub, the massif closed about the Terek altogether in vertical curtains of rock, whose kestrel-wheeling summits loomed three hundred feet above, and almost snuffed out river and road together.

Then, cresting a ridge, I entered such thick cloud that I could not see fifty yards ahead, but drove along a track suspended between blurred hills on one side and a drop into silence on the other. The rain was still falling. The road had dwindled to a track. In a half-farmed valley where it descended, I rounded a spur to find dwellings like stone beehives rotting on the slope. It was an Ossetian city of the dead.

The river flowed stark and cold under its hillside. In the distant valley the village of the living, which it served, looked cheerless and ordinary. It was these outlandish sepulchres which seemed to contain the Ossetian identity, a timeless ancestor-worship. Their windowless towers were each pierced by a single shaft. The richer families lay in slate-roofed mausoleums, the poorer in stone huts half sunk beneath the ground. Their tapering roofs of alternating slate and stone gave them a weird, Hindu look. They had been here ever since the fourteenth century, perhaps longer, and were barely discontinued.

An Ossetian woman lived nearby, to guard them. She hailed me through the bitter wind on the hill. Why was I alone? Was I not cold? Where was my woman?

Nothing showed underfoot but a savage medley of stones and grass. A cold blast of wind enveloped the valley. I sheltered in one of the shafts, where sparrows flitted in and out, and peered through its dimness. Here, and in many of the taller towers, the corpses still stretched yellowing in their clothes, stacked one above the other on decaying timber floors, so that arms and legs dangled between the splitting planks and whole families and generations lay jumbled together in heaps of rotting garments and bones. The air had half mummified them; their ribs, dresses and dust-clogged intestines were stuck indissolubly together in depersonalized confusion.

The woman was at my elbow. She was heavy and dark, grossly motherly. She shepherded me into her hut away from the cold, and brewed me tea. The hut was furnished only with a bed and a stove. Her children had gone away to the cities, she said, that’s where everybody went now. And the tombs? Her mouth flashed with gold teeth. ‘Yes, my family’s all over there.’ She shook her head. ‘But you see how it is, everything falling. Somebody should renovate it. It’s a historical place, you see, centuries old. It’s not death that’s a shame. We all die. It’s the indignity of it….’

I could think of nothing comforting to say. The place fell into my journey like a monstrous caesura, violated, meaningless.



By noon I was going south on the Georgian Military Highway—‘one of the most beautiful mountain roads in the world’, says the old Baedeker—which winds across the deep heart of the Caucasus to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. Through the first half of the last century the Russians pushed the great artery southwards as they subdued the upland tribes, until it dropped at last into the valleys north of Turkey.

But all was invisible as I approached. Clouds and rain thrashed across the mountain wall, which engulfed me before I knew of it. Greenish streams and black shale poured and frothed between the cliffs and clattered over the road. Above my way great rock-scarps hovered for hundreds of feet, crowned with Gothic pinnacles and clinging trees. After the interminable Russian plains, they struck me almost with alarm. The road seemed scarcely to rise at all, but to penetrate deeper and deeper into the massif. Alongside, the infant Terek boiled and curdled brown-white. It was barbarously beautiful.

Then my way entered a seemingly impassable arena of cliffs which surged to a height of six thousand feet almost vertically into the sky, their summits undisclosed, adrift in cloud. In this savage place—the ancient Iberian Gates—the river rang with a mad, cold clamour and the air was moist and sunless, as if at the mouth of Hell. Pompey halted his legions here on the edge of the recorded world, and the Romans closed the ravine’s mouth with colossal wooden and iron-bound gates, as if to shut out the unknown for ever. Rotted and tumbling castles clung on the rocks’ shoulders or perched above the desolate stream in a prism of spray. From one, runs legend, the Georgian queen Tamara unsportingly pitched her beheaded lovers into the river after a single night. Across the canyon’s face whole clouds drifted independently, or hung windless.

Then slowly, brokenly, the road levered itself out of the twilight. The Terek sank to a tormented sliver, and vanished. I could glimpse, far below, the chaotic plunge of spurs towards its torrent. The tarmac became more splintered, the peaks more austere, the shale more vertiginous. At last the way climbed so high that the clouds cracked apart and a rent of artificial-looking blue appeared. Suddenly, miraculously, I was travelling along a green upland where rivulets trickled and the hills were touched with autumn shrubs. I was in Georgia.

The name defines a land whose inhabitants are ancient to it, a people of the black-eyed Armenoid kind, the self-styled offspring of biblical giants. For at least three thousand years they have held their mountain kingdom through disunion, invasion and prodigious bursts of independence, becoming Christian early in the fourth century and surviving conquest with a native glitter and resource which never quite takes its oppressor seriously. Their villages were scattered on the meadows where the river spun itself in ten or twenty different tendrils, meandering through sward and flocks of sheep. Sturdy men and and handsome women were haymaking in the fields. Whenever I stopped they demanded if I had anything to sell, rubbing their fingers together in an age-old gesture of complicity. A cheerful anarchy reigned. Hairy pigs plodded about the village streets. The traffic police posts were abandoned. Isolated churches poked up from the ridges, sanctifying old legends, and distant outcrops of rock were spiked with castles and watch-towers blasted to stubs by the wind.