It is at Bagdad that you begin the ascent of the mountains of the southern border. So broad is the range, the pass so lofty and the road so tortuous, that it would be no easy matter to cross them in a single day. The direct distance measured on a map from the village to the pass is no less than seventeen miles, and along the road you cover some thirty-one miles. There is a hut at about half-way which is a convenient night's quarter, and we resolved to make it the goal of our second stage. We left Bagdad at three o'clock, with the valleys still open about us, with the wooded slopes rising on every side. After we had passed to the right branch of the stream which we had crossed below the village, the gradients commenced to make themselves felt, and here and there among the foliage the first fir trees started, the delicate blue firs. We followed the course of the running water up the spacious valley, through the forest which clothes the range from foot to summit and stands up along the ridges against the sky. The saturated atmosphere and warm climate of the seaboard were still with us; the one feeds, the other stimulates this luxuriant growth. Even on this fine day the clouds still lingered in the uppermost hollows, and when at four o'clock we opened up a beautiful side valley, all the landscape of wooded fork and winding torrent reflected the silvery hues of a crown of captive vapour clinging to the recesses at the head of the glen. Verst after verst we might count our progress on the white milestones, but we rarely observed a sign of the presence of man. A Georgian wayfarer, staff in hand, a peasant's cottage with its wide verandah, were the infrequent incidents in a scene which still belonged to Nature, and with which such figures and such objects harmonised. At last at the side of the road where the forest was thickest we came upon a solitary little cabin, a neat wooden structure, which we at once recognised as our shelter for the night. It was a quarter-past seven o'clock and we had reached an altitude of 1900 feet. [11] During the space of some fourteen miles from our mid-day station, the valley to which we had throughout been faithful had narrowed to a deep trough; and an hour before our arrival at the hut of Zikari the read was taken for a short space along the left bank of the stream, in order to avoid a projecting buttress of its eastern wall.