are the mountains of the Alani and Lesgis, the Iron-gate or Derbent, and the mountains of Georgia. This sea, therefore, is environed on three sides by mountains, but by plain ground on the north. Friar Andrew, in his journey, travelled along its south and east sides; and I passed its north side both in going and returning between Baatu and Mangu-khan, and along its western side in my way from Baatu into Syria. One may travel entirely round it in four months; and it is by no means true, as reported by Isidore, that it is a bay of the ocean, with which it nowhere joins, but is environed on all sides by the land. At the region from the west shore of the Caspian, where the Iron-gate of Alexander is situated, now called Derbent, and from the mountains of the Alani, and along the Palus Moeotis, or sea of Azoph, into which the Tanais falls, to the northern ocean, was anciently called Albania; in which Isidore says, that there were dogs of such strength and fierceness, as to fight with bulls, and even to overcome lions, which I have been assured by several persons to be true; and even, that towards the northern ocean, they have dogs of such size and strength, that the inhabitants make them draw carts like oxen[1]. [1] It is astonishing how easily a small exaggeration converts truth to fable. Here the ill-told story of the light sledges of the Tshutki, drawn by dogs of a very ordinary size, is innocently magnified into carts dragged by gigantic mastiffs.--E. SECTION XXI. _Of the Court of Baatu, and our Entertainment there_. On that part of the Volga where we arrived, they have lately built a new village, in which there is a mixed population of Russians and Tartars, established for the service of the ferry, that they may transport messengers going to and from the court of Baatu, as he always remains on the east side of the Volga. Neither does he ever travel any farther north, in summer, than to the place where we arrived on that river, and was even then descending towards the south. From January till August, he and all the other Tartars ascend by the banks of rivers towards the cold regions of the north, and in August they begin again to return. From the place where we came to the Volga, is a journey of five days northward to the first villages of the Greater Bulgaria, and I am astonished to think how the Mahometan religion should have travelled thither; as from Derbent, on the extreme borders of Persia, it is thirty days journey to pass the desert and ascend along the Volga into Bulgaria, and in the whole track there are no towns, and only a few villages where the Volga falls into the Caspian; yet these Bulgarians[1] are the most bigotedly attached to the religion of Mahomet, of any of the nations that have been perverted to that diabolical superstition.