Читать книгу The Story Teller of the Desert—"Backsheesh!" or, Life and Adventures in the Orient - Thomas Wallace Knox - Страница 89

An hour after leaving Baidar we passed through a stone gateway, and came out upon the sea. Or, rather, we came out upon the edge of a mountain, and looked down more than a thousand feet upon the waters kissed by the rising sun, and broken into little billows just touched with crests of foam by a gentle breeze from the east. Away on the horizon and below our line of sight lay a stratum of white clouds, and in the far distance to the left the wind and sun were chasing away the remains of the darkness of the November night, and near at hand on the right and left lay the mountains with great, rugged tops, round which half a dozen eagles were whirling and occasionally disappearing in the floating masses of light clouds. Down below, toward the upper; part of the peninsula, the mountains sloped away but so slightly as to make us wonder how we would find a passage among them.

I have become familiar with a good deal of scenery in the past twenty years, but I know few things that can surpass this first view of the sea on the road from Sevastopol to Yalta. The scene bursts suddenly upon you. At one minute you are among the hills and forests and sparsely scattered fields, where you have been travelling ever since you left Balaklava, and you are voting the whole thing a trifle monotonous. You pass through the gateway, which is arched and bastioned like a small fortress, and what a change in the picture! You are in a narrow road, with scarcely sufficient standing place for the carriage and horses; the crag at your left seems ready to topple over and cover you, and as you look up a thousand or twelve hundred feet along its gray sides, you perceive deep and irregular fissures in which, here and there, trees are clinging quite safe from the woodman’s axe, and forming a secure resting for the eagles that circle about them. Their prevailing grey color is diversified by the tints peculiar to volcanic rocks everywhere, and they cut the sky with a sharp and jagged outline whose every angle is rendered more distinct by the great elevation to which the mountains rise above you. This mountain-chain stretches about thirty miles along the coast; it stands bold and upright from the sea above Balaklava, but gradually trends away from the water until, at Yalta, it is more than five miles distant.

Here, at the Baidar-gate, the strip of land is nearly a mile wide, but as you look down the dizzy distance you could solemnly aver that the width is not more than a hundred yards. The strip of land shelves rapidly, and is dotted with patches of forest, rough boulders, and the general debris of the mountain-chain, and stippled and streaked with little rivulets that trickle onward toward the sea. There are sharp ridges and deep ravines, barren patches and woody dells; the whole forming a favorite resort of the game-birds and the beasts that make this region an attractive one for the hunter.

Here and there you see a house nestling and crouching in a lovely valley, and as you proceed on your way you find the houses and villas becoming every hour more and more numerous. The high cliffs shelter the land from northerly winds, and as the sun pours full and strong over the sea, a climate of peculiar warmth is developed that gives this part of the Crimea a fertility of almost tropical luxuriance. The productions of this region are of wonderful variety and excellence.

We whirled down and along the front of the mountains, hour after hour, and with new combinations of land and ocean constantly presented to our eyes. We halted at Alupka, where is the palace of Prince Woronzoff, and at the hotel we had a comfortable meal, which our morning ride had prepared us to enjoy. We washed it down with the excellent wine of the Crimea, bearing the Woronzoff brand, and grown in the vineyards that dot all the hill-sides in the last dozen miles of our drive. After a two hours’ halt we were on the road again, and passing the palace of Livadia, the summer residence of the Emperor, and one of the prettiest spots in the world, we reached Yalta an hour before sunset, having made one of the most delightful rides that can fall to the lot of the traveller.

Yalta is the Long Branch or Newport of Southern Russia, and many persons go there to spend the summer and autumn. The situation is charming and the climate delicious; the Emperor has a palace close at hand, and as he spends every autumn there, it is no wonder that Yalta has become fashionable. The principal street along the sea-shore has a fringe of hotels, and so great was the rush at the time of our visit, that there was a difficulty in obtaining rooms. Prices were high, and from a contemplation of the bill of fare, I should think the hotel-keepers were anxious to make a fortune in a short time and retire from business.

Picturesque Russians and Crim-Tartars wander through the streets, making a marked contrast to the fashionables from Odessa and Moscow. In the market the “Doubter” got into trouble by handling and tasting some fruit, and was compelled to buy it in order to get out of the scrape.

He had an inordinate passion for handling everything (except his own money when bills were to be paid) and this propensity served sometimes to increase our annoyances, and occasionally our expenses. At a church in Odessa he broke a part of the fixtures on the altar because he insisted upon picking them up, and he only escaped trouble by pretending not to understand what was said to him. He didn’t rely much on his senses of hearing and seeing, but when it came to smelling, tasting, and feeling—particularly the latter—he was on hand. He wasn’t satisfied with seeing a picture but he must feel it and smell it, and not till then did he believe in its existence. The same was the case with nearly everything else that could be touched; and when he saw things in a show-case he wanted them opened for his amusement and manipulation. During his journey in the East he felt nearly everything within his reach, except an impulse of generosity, and with that he had no desire to become acquainted.

We rose early in Yalta, and were off for Odessa, where we arrived without accident or delay.