Friday, May 15, 1840 (Partial Entry)
1840
May
Friday 15
2 3/4 a.m.
12
Réaumur 14 1/2° at 3 a.m. could not sleep for heat and fleas – these
arched Earth-covered rooms very close – 2 little windows about 24 X 18 inches ?
pierce the 2 or 3 foot thick walls (ours a corner room) – Should guess the room
about 5 X 4 yards and perhaps about 4 yards high to the crown of the arch – I
could not live comfortably in the Eastern souterrain houses – Too
cellar-like –
Caravanserai court 50 X 60
yards, the latter and longer, the Entrance side – Must have been handsome in its
day – Now a heap of ruins inside – All the rooms but 6 or 7 roofless and more
or less filled with rubbish – Probably about 50 rooms –
The town very picturesque – Surrounded
by ruins extending to a considerable distance – On the river Ganja – Wood
bridge over it – Mountains become hills (left) at Elizabethpol, and (right)
(going towards Baku) seem to leave us now at 6 a.m. and the eye wanders up
endless plain to the right –
Charming drive over the
plain, wide
open valley, the snow mountains still fine (right) to here Kuraktchaiskii Redu
–
versts
4 1/2 to 6 Elizabethpol to Kuraktchaiskii Redu 19
6 1/4 to 7 28/.. Kuraktchaiskii
to Kurulutchaiskii 20
the ferry over the Kour 13
versts from Tchemaklinskii
7 55/.. to 11 20/.. Kurulutchaiskii to Post Tchemaklinskii 33
1/7
11 53/.. to 1 20/.. Post
Tchemaklinskii to Aranskii . 18
1 35/.. to 3 12/.. Aranskii
to Turiantchaiskoi . 17
4 3/4 to 6 1/4 Turiantchaiskoi to Goktchaiskoi . 21
6 3/4 to 8 50 .. Goktchaiskoi
to Karamarianskoi . 17
145 1/7
Station house at
Kuraktchaiskii the same sort of station house as ever since Tiflis –
Charming drive – woody –
mulberry, some oak and elm – and shrubby, grenadier myrtle? jujubier?
and tamarisk in flower, beautiful little pink flowers in bunches in grappes
– Something in the style of the lilack flower bunches – 5 hares ran
across us – Plenty of game here – Excellent narrow, hard sand road – Rain in
the night laid the dust for us – We near the hills over the Kour – Very fine –
Broken and picturesque – Beautiful day – sun warm from before 7 a.m.
Road more interesting from
Astapha the river – The station house
there – and still more so from Elizabethpol – Abundance of sheep and cattle – Oxen
yesterday also, loaded like horses – Almost all (or all?) the sheep with
the fat tails, like a large 2 or 3 inch thick flap covering the whole buttock
with a little tail turned up in the middle,
and this and the inside part of the
flap often a little turned
and exposed to view, naked, looking queer and not very nice –
The station house on an
eminence – Magnificent aspens in the hollow there down to the little streams,
and small-leafed willows and wild vines, and mulberry trees and snow
mountains right (i.e. south – i.e. right as one goes to Baku), charming – The
Kurtchai river in sight at the foot of the fine range of hill – the Kour they
say, on the other side of this range separated by, as it were, a tongue of land
from the range of hill or mountain seen beyond it from here –
At 8 35/.., cross the
picturesque little Thchura, a little
winding stream hid along sand-rock banks and shrubs – At 9 25/.., close under
the white broken picturesque indurated sand mountains and at 9 1/2, at
the ferry of the Kour, the rapid muddy Kour, broad as the Thames at
Richmond ?
2 rades – raft or board platform
fixed on 3 tree-boats – One raft for the carriage and another for the 9 horses
(our own five, and the Cossacks’ four) and 3 Single tree-boats, but we preferred going with the carriage and
sat outside on the servants seat for the sake of the fine view up and down the river
– Embarked in 10 minutes at 9 3/4.
Kept close under the highish sand bank covered with
willow bushes etc., very picturesque, for 7 1/2 minutes before we attempted
to cross, then crossed in 7 minutes more (over in 14 minutes at 9 59/..),
the current having carried us almost twice as far down as we had gone up? so that we made some such track as from a to b and then from b to c.
The horses crossed in the
same way a little lower down the river – We landed 1st, and as we stood looking
at them, the raft seemed almost as if running away with the current rather than
coming to land about a hundred yards lower down than ourselves –
3 men and our Cossack with
a little short oar (or as it were
long shafted spade) paddled or worked against the stream between our tree boats
and one at our outside and this was all the force we had –
The land-rock mountains everywhere
sillonnées accidentées – ridgy and hillocky – Very striking and picturesque – White
and arid – Merely sprinkled with little tufts of some sort of grass?
or what?
Left bank of river, as it
sweeps from the mountains, wooded – All the wood today in full foliage – Beautiful,
wooded banks down the river and upwards – Sand rock mountains and a fringe of wood
on right bank – Pretty scene – 3 tree-boats with 2 men each scattered on the
river below us – Large group of cattle at our landing place and the queer
camel-gaited elephant-skinned cattle lying down in the river near the edge with
their faces resting on the water, all the rest covered except perhaps a bit of
the back –
On landing, we were 13 versts from the station and therefore 37 1/7 – 13 = 20 1/7 versts from our
last station, Kurulutchaiskii – Began to embark at 8 35/.. to 9 3/4 – Over at 9
59/.. Off again at 10 25/.., therefore the ferry had taken us – had delayed
us 50 minutes –
New sort of Station house at Post Tchemaklinskii – More picturesque and
cottage-like – 2 little gable-ended porches – small windows – Very neat and
pretty – Nicest station house since Tiflis, – Nice, carpeted room à l’orientale,
and on the opposite side the court, the neat gable-end-porched Cossack barrack
– Should have liked to sleep here –
At 12 20/.. in 2 minutes,
pass the Aranskii river, pronounced Arceski – Beautiful day –
Fine air – The plain prettily shrubbed with Zugube? and another winged leafed
shrub, the wood of which smells agreeably enough on being broken – No horses –
Off with the same at 1 35/.. – At 1 3/4, meet return horses and change 3 of
ours and 1 of our drivers, and off again in 18 minutes! at 2 3/.. –
At 3 8/.., Toorhan river, broad stony bed, 5 or 6 streams – At the station at 3
12/.. – Good grass the last 2 stages all along – ray grass? or very like it,
and other grasses by dint of irrigation – The stationhouse here, Turiantchaisko,
faces the fine mountain glen, or small valley of the Toorhan (Turian
river), 20 versts from the Lesghiens – They came down 2 years ago, and burnt
the house and assassinated all the people at the station – No Sentinel then,
and peu de monde – Now a sentinel every night, and 8 Cossacks and 8 Tatars
stationed here – The present house new and not quite in the old situation but
rather lower down – Saw one or 2 partly burnt beams lying about – The
station houses on the other side the Kura (Kour) built 10 year s ago – Those on
this side the Kour only built 3 years ago – From
this station to the next and next after the most dangerous – having to
WYAS Finding Number
SH:7/ML/E/24/0105
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