Seen from this point, the tor-
rent to all appearance plunged
directly into the heart of the
mountains, and it was impossible
to discover how it found a way
out. The savage grandeur of
the scenery here attained its
height, and so far as my own
and my companions' experience
goes, there is no gorge in the
Central Caucasus of ecjual gran-
deur.
Henceforth the cleverly con-
trived rock-staircase which con-
nects Balkar with the outside
world finds room — now on one
side, now on the other — to creep along the base of the cliffs at the
river's edge ; until at last, just when the careless observer would
think it was hopelessly defeated, it crawls across the face of an
overhanging bluffs by a gallery, partly cut into the rock, partly built
out from it. We next wound over barren and disintegrated slopes,
broken occasionally by stone-capped earth-pillars, similar to those
we had seen before on the Ardon, in the Caucasus, and to the
well-known examples in the Val d'Herens in Switzerland.
THE GORGE UF THE CHEKEK



BALKAR AND BEZINGI 1G5

At last the difficulties are left behind, the cliffs draw back in
two grand curtains, and the cultivated basin of Balkar, studded
with human habitations, opens in front. A castellated farm or
fortress watches the exit from the defile. The lower slopes — no
longer chffs, for we have passed from the zone of limestone to
the crystalline schists^are bright with corn; but not a tree
is visible on the vast, monotonous green downs. The only
incidents in the landscape are stone boundary-walls and stones
in heaps or scattered. The heaps are villages, the scattered blocks
mark graveyards.
