Читать книгу Around the Black Sea. Asia Minor, Armenia, Caucasus, Circassia, Daghestan, the Crimea, Roumania онлайн

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Twenty-seven miles from Vladicaucasus, going south, the road suddenly turns a sharp corner around a point of rocks and the traveller finds himself face to face with Kazbek, a steep, glittering dome of snow rising 16,523 feet above the sea. There is a little village of the same name at the snow line, which is about 9,000 feet, in the most savage part of the range, and the Russian government keeps a rest house there for the shelter of those who wish to make the ascent.

According to local tradition, Prometheus was chained to a certain precipice on the slopes of Kazbek. The guides will show you the exact spot, just as visitors to the Chateau d’If in the harbour of Marseilles are shown the exact dungeon in which the hero of Alexander Dumas’s famous novel, “Monte Cristo,” was imprisoned. They forget that both were heroes of fiction, and Æschylus, in writing his tragedy, evidently did not know the geography of the Caucasus, for he describes the rock as overhanging the sea, which is more than three hundred miles distant. There are several magnificent glaciers in sight of the roadway, those of Dievdorak being among the largest in the world and altogether the most extensive in Europe. There are none in Switzerland that will compare with them.