The room in which the _pope_, his son, the son’s old nurse, and we took our meals contained nothing but a table and the necessary number of chairs. The menu alternated between two dishes, one day chicken, the next day mutton; and the napkins were changed only once a fortnight. The _pope_ supped his broth with a noise that reminded one of sporting whales. Below our room was a cellar in which sauerkraut was being made, and the odor from it came up to us through the cracks in the flooring; but nothing, nothing disturbed our good humor, and the actively progressing translation of the Georgian poem gave us lively satisfaction. A whole vanished world opened before us—the world of the thirteenth century in this remote corner of the earth. An epoch to which the Georgians look back with pride, because it was the climax of their country’s glory—the epoch when the great Queen Tamara was on the throne. Shosta Rustaveli sang at her court and celebrated her fame, her power, her charms. We learned from the mouth of our patriotic journalist even more of the past of his country, and of the departed splendor of Queen Tamara, than we did from the poetry of the Georgian bard. Her name stirs the Georgians to real religious devotion; the memory of those ancient days celebrated by Rustaveli lives as something sublime and immortal. The Georgians look back on a history extending over twenty-three centuries; their first king, Phamawaz by name, was elected three hundred and two years before Christ, and the Christian religion was introduced four hundred years after Christ by Saint Nino. Like every ancient history, that of Georgia is a history of wars. The land was surrounded by hostile nations and tribes; in particular, it was constantly assailed by the Ottomans and Persians. Of course the chronicles tell of the victorious battles which the Georgians fought against their enemies, and their pride in this finds expression in their greeting. “Good-morning” in Georgia is _gamardjoba_, which means victory; the reply is _gamardjosse_, “May he (God) make you victorious.” The reign of Queen Tamara is regarded as the golden age of the land. The chronicles aver that under this queen prosperity prevailed, the fine arts flourished, splendid buildings were erected,—the same as you find it in all the ancient documents of flattery under the name of history, where all possible achievements are always ascribed to the then reigning monarch. If the rulers were cruel, the strictness of their rule is praised; if they were not, then this negative virtue is extolled to the skies. So it is to be read in the chronicle concerning Tamara, “No one at her command was deprived of his limbs or of his eyesight”; and that is the more noteworthy as at her time and afterwards the principle laid down by one of her ancestors, the heroic Wakhtang Gorgaslan, was in full force: “Whoever in war escapes death and fails to bring back the head or the hand of an enemy shall die by our hand.”