At sight of the gathering tempest the superstitious huntsman is not entirely exempt from terror. Some of the calcareous mountains, like the Beschtau, for example, being a perfect barometer, he knows, when their top becomes covered with clouds as with a hat, and their entire form is gradually enveloped in a mantle of mists, that there will be foul weather. Even the degree of wind and rain may be calculated with a considerable degree of certainty from the extent and different tints of the vapors; and if the indications are exceedingly threatening the hunter immediately erects his tent, if he have one, as on the ocean the sailor furls his canvas; or, lacking this protection, he seeks for the shelter of some projecting rock, or the entrance of a cavern. There when the sun is shrouded in clouds, and the blackness almost of night falls like a pall over the mountains, when the wind howls around the summits, and the thunder with its infinity of reverberations rattles, and bounds from crag to crag throughout the chain, seeming to make the very rocks tremble and totter, then affrighted he hears in the winds the flapping of the wings of that monstrous bird of the mountains whose age is a thousand years; in the lightnings which play over the abyss he sees the glaring eyes and waving mane of the wild white horse who, issuing from his stall under the glaciers, races with the storm; and in the thunders hears the resounding wheels of the chariot of Elijah kept, say some of the ancient Christian traditions, in the Redeemer's palace on the top of Kasbek. But in a brief hour the storm is overpast; for the changes of weather in this range of mountains, extending from one great sea to another, are sudden in all seasons of the year excepting summer. The clouds are rapidly rolled away to the eastward where the bow of promise spans the heavens as brilliant as when it was first bent over the neighboring Ararat, and where the accumulated piles of vapor are gorgeously burnished by the rays of the descending sun. Then rises over the broken ridge of the Black mountains the moon, just beginning, perhaps, to wane. How black indeed are they compared with the snow-white peaks which stand bathed in the silvery light. How black, too, is the abyss out of which rise the perpendicular cliffs, and the lofty conical shafts glittering with ice. The summits cast their long, sharply cut shadows athwart each other; every leaf on tree or plant which still holds its raindrop flashes as with a diamond; the night has not a breath of air; and nature lies entranced without a pulsation, save in the roar and trickling of everywhere falling waters. XIII. SONGS