Let us realise for a moment the meaning of the landscape, and allow the mind to assist the eye. The opposite mountains belong to the girdle of ranges which buttress the Armenian tableland, the same which we have followed along the coast of the Black Sea, and which we left at our entrance upon the plain of the Rion stretching eastwards away from the shore. Here they constitute the barrier which separates the lowlands of Imeritia from the highlands about Akhaltsykh in the south; and, if you wish to examine the structure of this barrier more closely, you will find that the back or spine of the system consists of a ridge which extends in an easterly direction to about the longitude of Tiflis. The Caucasus, with an axis inclining south-eastwards, steps up to this latitudinal chain, and just east of Kutais the two systems join hands in the belt of picturesque hill scenery which divides the watershed of the Kur from that of the Rion, and which we already know under the name of the Meschic linking range. East of Tiflis the axis of the Armenian border ranges is turned towards south-east, and follows a direction parallel with that of Caucasus along the trough of the Kur towards the Caspian Sea. Like the Caucasus here in the north, its opposite neighbour, that southern bulwark extends from sea to sea; and some geographers have applied to it the name of Little Caucasus, a misleading and, if we attach importance to the phenomena of Nature, a most inappropriate name. For while the northern range may be described as an isolated and independent structure--independent in appearance at least--which rises on the one side from about the same levels as those to which on the other side it declines, that on the south is in reality nothing more than a succession of steps or buttresses which lead up to and flank the Armenian highlands. The first stages of our journey will conduct us up the slopes of those mountains, from a plain which does not much exceed the sea-level, across a ridge of which the pass has an altitude of about 7000 feet, to plains which range between a height of 7000 and not less than 3000 feet above the sea.