The World and Its People, Part 42

A MOSLEM HOME IN BEIRUT

CHAPTER XXI — THE REPUBLICS OF THE CAUCASUS
GEORGIA AND AZERBAIJAN

The lands to the east of Armenia also won their freedom as a result of the World War, if their position can be called one of freedom. Russia formerly held the mastery over these lands, and the Russian Soviet government declared that every region had a right to choose its own form of government-so long as it chose to be under Soviet rule. Hence each of these eastern Russian provinces was allowed to declare itself an independent "Soviet Republic." But when any one of them has attempted a more real independence it has been sharply and bloodily repressed.

The Soviet republics we wish now to visit are those of Georgia and Azerbaijan (ǎz' ĕr bi jahn'). They occupy the region east and north of Armenia, extending from her frontier to the summit of the Mountains of the Caucasus (kaw' kă sus), beyond which lies eastern Europe, those provinces of Russia in Europe which we shall visit later. Between Ararat and the Caucasus there extends a broad valley reaching from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea. Georgia occupies the western half of this region, rising from the Black Sea. Azerbaijan occupies the eastern half, descending to the Caspian.

Georgia we can reach without much difficulty. It has its Black Sea port, Batum, at the extreme southeastern corner of the sea. Here all 1314 Batum, the Oil Port of the East the Black Sea steamers end their trip; and here the oil from the noted Caspian oil-fields reaches the steamships which convey it to other lands. This oil, while coarser than the American grade, is widely used in eastern Europe. A pipe line over five hundred miles in length carries the oil from the Caspian across Azerbaijan and Georgia to Batum, which thus becomes the chief oil port of the Near East.

Landing at Batum, we shall be pleasantly surprised by the modern and cleanly appearance of the town. It is almost wholly Russian built, and the Russians certainly improved the cleanliness and order of the East. Batum has wide tree-lined streets, a couple of well-kept parks, and a promenade with cafés along the shore. It has also its Eastern section in which the poorer classes live, a typical shabby, unsanitary gathering of hovels and bazaars, where fever is forever bred, and from which every form of illness spreads to the Russian section. There is a gorgeous Russian cathedral too, with the five domes which we shall find typical of Russian Christian churches. It has a most elaborate set of chimes which seem to be kept ringing most of the time. They are so loud that, when they begin, the whole city stops perforce to listen; and even the chattering in the bazaars ceases until the sounds have passed.

Batum is much too Russian to be typically Georgian. To see the real Georgian people we must take the railroad which runs from here across the entire width of both Georgia and Azerbaijan to the Caspian Sea. Already from Batum we could see upon the northern horizon the great main range of the Caucasus, the mountain ridge which was believed by the ancients to be the end of the world. In one respect at least the Caucasus is the most impressive of all mountain ranges; for it is not a collection of many rounded mountain peaks, with their valleys between; it is a solid wall of rock. Along all its seven hundred miles of length, it is broken only by a single narrow pass. Except for that, it presents a continuous wall, nowhere less than eight thousand feet in height, and rising in many places far beyond this. Its chief summit, Mt. Elbruz, is 18,500 feet above the sea, even higher than Ararat, far higher than Mt. Blanc, so that if we figure the Caucasus as a European mountain system, it is here rather than in the Alps that the continent rises to its greatest neight. There is no other such mountain ridge in the world. No wonder geographers have used it as a dividing line between two continents; and no wonder those first world explorers, the Greeks, coming on the range as we have done from the Black Sea, figured that this impassable barrier was the end of the domain of man. It was the one complete barrier Continued 1316 1315

IN THE BAZAARS OF TIFLIS
Rich rugs are here bargained over by shrewd buyers. These are mainly Persian rugs thrown on the market since the World War.

1316 which no conqueror could climb, and from which no invader ever descended.

Here, on the edge of the world, on a precipice of the Caucasus, the Greek God of heaven, Zeus, was said to have chained Prometheus, the friend of man. The legend said that Prometheus, whose name means "forethought," had stolen fire from Heaven as a gift to man, and had foreseen and refused to reveal to Zeus how man, by the use of thought, would one day rise superior to Zeus himself. Hence Zeus made the life of Forethought a continual torture on his precipice. The Georgians have adopted the legend as history, and will point out to us the very cliff against which Prometheus was bound.

Under the shadow of this mighty range, our train carries us slowly eastward. To the left we see the rising mountains; to the right a broad and exceptionally green and fertile valley, sloping amid misty meadows to its central river, the Kur. This is but a poor, ramshackle, outworn railway; and we shall be fortunate if we find even a box car in which to ride. It would take great influence in Batum, to secure even such a car to ourselves alone; for the running of this railroad is a very costly affair, and every pound of freight is worth almost its weight in gold by the time it reaches Tiflis, the Georgian capital, over two hundred miles back from the sea. Moreover every railroad in the Near East is almost blocked by the poor, starving folk who linger around its stations and its cars, snatching a ride if they can. They know that they are immeasurably miserable where they are, so that a change to any other place may be for the better. Those of us who have seen the Near East since the World War, will be forever haunted by a vision of its hopeless misery.

Tiflis, when we reach it, proves a fascinating Georgian city, though even here we shall find many traces of the old Russian rule and Russian influence. The Georgians are a fighting people of the original white or Caucasian race, and are now mainly of the Christian religion. They are tall and dark and fierce; and in their former days of independence their kings scattered titles among them so freely, that almost every man you meet is a nobleman. This has perhaps been a helpful thing for the race, because each man held within himself the pride of being noble, and could never become so abjectly spiritless as the downtrodden peasantry of some of the neighboring lands. Yet as a Russian merchant said, warningly, "it is not worth while here to take off your hat to anything less than a prince." Even the cab drivers are nobles in Tiflis.

The Georgians are famed as metal-smiths, and whole streets of the 1317 capital are given over to this work. Quaint inlays of gold or silver set in steel or copper are artistically prepared and eagerly sought, especially for swords and pistols. There is no law in Georgia to prohibit the carrying of weapons, and a Georgian gentleman is usually a walking arsenal of pistols with beautiful handles and daggers with inlaid blades. The Georgian women are reputed to be singularly beautiful, but we shall not see much evidence of this in the streets of Tiflis. It is scarce a safe place for women. Such as we see, are wearing flowing veils, but the drapery is seldom allowed to hide the face, falling down the back and shoulders instead. Perhaps the fame of their beauty came only from the dark faced Moslems who were particularly attracted by the white skin and fair hair of the Georgian race.

IN THE TARTAR QUARTER OF TIFLIS

Seventy different languages are said to be spoken in Tiflis. Of all the different peoples who have migrated east or west across this valley between the Black Sea and the Caspian, some few from each invasion seem to have been left here within the shadow of the mountains. While the Russians held control they kept good order in Tiflis; but now that the Georgians are at least in part their own masters, they have much trouble in suppressing the many strangers within their gates. The 1318 Tartars are especially turbulent; they are a small, slant-eyed Turanian folk from the far East who are reckless and ferocious fighters and who occupy a whole quarter of the town. The Armenians have also a section of their own, and the Persians another. The mountain river of the Caucasus, the Kur, flows through Tiflis, and on down eastward to join the great Araxes River. It divides the town in two, and so keeps the different, defiant quarters more or less separated and at peace, but this uncertain peace is perhaps best preserved by a strongly built Russian fortress which stands on a cliff a hundred feet above the river, and which has many prison cells beneath it hollowed from the rock. These are kept well-filled with political prisoners on the plea of preserving the liberty of Georgia.

On a rocky summit, several hundred feet above Tiflis, may be seen the frowning but empty walls of the citadel of the old Georgian kings who ruled here centuries ago; and only a few miles to the northward we can visit the ruins of Mtskheta (mits kā' tă), the oldest city of the Georgians. The people claim that its antiquity and theirs rival the antiquity of the Armenians with their city of Noah. The region around Mtskheta has many limestone cliffs, and these have been carved into clifftowns like those of our Indians in New Mexico. These secure habitations of a primeval race give weight to the Georgian claim of antiquity.

In going north from Tiflis, we are headed straight towards that single break in the Caucasus range of which we spoke. This is the pass of Dariel, and even this is 7,700 feet high, so that it does not greatly lower the barrier of the ridge. The pass of Dariel winds its way northward through a ravine with rock walls sometimes thousands of feet in height. At the narrowest and almost the highest point of the pass, it is guarded by an ancient ruined castle, attributed to Queen Tamara. Tamara is the favorite queen and heroine of Georgia. Every patriotic Georgian likes to have a picture of her in his home; but these pictures are modern and fanciful, fitted to the taste of the artist and the purchaser, and the legends of Tamara are so fantastic that it is impossible to say what grain of truth is preserved amid the mass of fable. Perhaps all we can surely say is that she was a conquering queen of the twelfth century, who aided the spread of Georgian power far southward over the land of the Armenians.

Eastward from Tiflis, our railroad soon crosses the artificial boundary into the land of Azerbaijan. The people here are also Georgians, only with a lesser mixture of Armenian blood and much more of Continued 1320 1319

THE DARIEL PASS
Here, at the narrowest and almost the highest point of this wild pass in the Caucasus, stands the medieval fortress of Queen Tamara, the heroine of Georgia.

1320 Persian. The river Kur now joins the Araxes, and the two flow down together into the Caspian Sea. Between them, they embrace a fertile region whose melons and cherries are famous, and where almost every semi-tropical fruit is grown. There are rich grain fields here also in quiet times, though the constant bickering between the Georgians and Armenians results in many a raid from either side, and crops are so often destroyed and houses burned that broad regions often lie waste and wholly unoccupied, without a single inhabitant.

As we approach the Caspian Sea, the great Caucasus range sinks until, close by the water, it is a mere ridge perhaps thirty feet in height. A final peninsula, Cape Apsherun, juts out into the sea; and our railroad comes to an end at Baku, the chief town of this region, a modern town, the center of the famous Caspian oil lands. The oil of Baku has been one main cause of modern fighting in the East.

The Caspian Sea which here shuts us from the farther East is an inland sea, the largest such sea in the world having no connection with the ocean. Hence like the Dead Sea and our own Salt Lake it keeps its level by the evaporation of its waters, and slowly, though in the case of so large a sea, very slowly, increases in saltiness. At present the Caspian Sea is losing its waters. Its surface lies nearly a hundred feet below ocean level; and there is ample evidence that at one time it rose much higher, and spread over much more ground, probably even so far as to include the neighboring Aral Sea to the eastward.

It would be hard to conceive a body of water of more drear appearance than the Caspian. Its shores are low and as barren as a desert. No green grows close to the water. The rivers are few; and around Baku there is no fresh water whatever, either above ground or in wells. Every bit of water for this entire city of over a hundred thousand people has to be carried in barrels over long distances, or brought through a difficult pipe line which is out of order more than half the time.

Baku began as a Persian city of the fire worshippers. The oil which springs everywhere from the soil here may have first caught fire by an accident; but its burning was regarded as a miracle and the fire was kept carefully alight and tended for centuries. A brick temple was built, and at night the soaring oil fire flamed high above its tower chimneys, giving light to all the heavens. The entire fire worship of the ancient East may well have sprung from some accidental ignition of these oil wells of Baku.