Such characteristics were strange to some among our party, for only my cousin and myself knew the interior of Asia and recognised in the note which was now for the first time sounded the commencement of a familiar theme. We pursued our way in silence, each absorbed by his own reflections and all responsive to the same spell. Through the bleak landscape wound the little river and stretched the white line of the road. Here and there on the margin of the water or beyond the irregular border of the pebble-strewn bed a little orchard or a patch of garden planted with potatoes, formed a spot of verdure contrasting with the hues around. [12] Where were the villages? For it seemed that there must be inhabitants who had gathered this scanty harvest and ploughed the surface of the darker soil. They select the slope of a hill or the rise of an undulation; the door and front of their dwellings are alone visible, the back is caverned into the shelving ground; you must pass close to such a settlement and by daylight to notice the incidence of a human element in the scene. We came upon four villages of this pattern before the mid-way station was reached. They were peopled by Tartars, who were occupied in threshing and winnowing the season's corn. The husks were flying in the air and the bright cottons of men and women fluttered in the breeze. Benara, the posting-house which supplied us with fresh horses, is situated close to the bank of the stream, at no great distance above the point where it joins the Koblian Chai, a river which collects the drainage of the extreme north-western angle of the tableland. A little below this junction the united waters receive a further affluent, known as the Poskhov Chai, which gathers the streams from south-west and south-east. Even at this season the three combined form a river of fair size, flowing through the plain on an easterly course in a bed of many channels, and joining the Kur after passing through the town of Akhaltsykh. This river is usually called the Akhaltsykh Chai. Our road followed its course, taking an abrupt bend eastwards and still faithful to the left bank. Some hillocks closed the view on the north for a short space; then they flattened, and in that direction the great plain rolled around us, bounded in the distance by hummock hills. At intervals we caught a glimpse of the pine-clad ridges of the border range, standing up on the horizon in the east. Behind us the long-drawn outlines and bare slopes of the mountains of the tableland, and towards the south the ground rising from the right bank of the river to the summit-line of a mountain mass of this character which has the hummock formation throughout.