This indeed is the East, the East beneath a sky perpetually blue and a climate which would make our Riviera green with envy.
Merchandise in this district was conveyed for the most part by camels and it was a common occurrence to see them in the streets of Tiflis.
[Illustration: TIFLIS--A PERSIAN BAKER’S SHOP]
[Illustration: TIFLIS--A PERSIAN SHOEMAKER’S SHOP]
From the windows of the train I was able to distinguish a caravan, numbering about eighty camels all in Indian file, silhouetted against the sky, on the edge of the Caspian, which the train skirts before it bends round the end of the mountains near Bakou and threads the valleys of Transcaucasia.
I have always admired those fine animals with their placid expression and their grand, slow, soft movements, which nothing seems to disturb.
The mineral wealth of the Caucasus is worthy of _The Arabian Nights_, but, unfortunately, owing to the non-existence of railways, it is next to impossible to utilize the output from but very few places.
The oil wells at Bakou and other places are, as every one knows, one of the great sources of the wealth of the country. Nothing is more terrible to behold than one of these oil-wells when it catches fire, which sometimes happens.
The Armenian church is interesting; the Armenians are known as the Jews of the Caucasus, and there is a saying that one Armenian is equal to five Jews!
There are two Catholic churches, one specially frequented by the Poles and built in the Polish quarter; the other built almost entirely by one of my grandmother’s brothers, and where I used to go.
This grand-uncle of mine, Baron Louis de Nicolay, became a celebrated Russian General and conqueror of Shamyl, the famous Caucasian Chief held to be invincible till then in his mountains. This uncle ended his days as a monk at the Grande-Chartreuse, near Grenoble, in France, where he was known to the last, even by the visitors who always asked to see him, as “the old Russian General.” He charmed them all in spite of himself by his brilliant intelligence and his charming gift of conversation; and they wondered how so much genius, hidden beneath the humble fustian of his frock, could adapt itself to the severe life of the cloister after the rough and free existence of a soldier and the emotions of the battle-field. The Superior allowed him a newspaper, a weak and solitary link to bind him to that world which had awarded him so many honours, but which he had left to be worthy of others more glorious.