In Tiflis, after too much vodka, in the biggest, best restaurant where the rats were so bold they would sit under your table and nibble your crumbs and run off a little way if you took the trouble to skid your feet at them--in Tiflis, where every kind of man goes by on the street, Negro and Turk, redhead and ash-blond, because every kind of man has poured through the Caucasus for thousands of years on the way to conquer Europe or the way back in conquest of Asia--in purple-walled Tiflis where the archeological strata are as clear as the story of the stones in a cross-cut syncline and bare human feet have drilled deep paths in the rock floor of the old Roman baths--in Tiflis where Persians still sit cross-legged on tables and play what Ted called snake-charmer music on bulbous pipes--we talked too much. We drank too much and talked too much--to a dozen tourists who sat about the big table, waiting for their late dinner--waiting an hour or two, as you do in Russia. Tourists who, for the most part, had come from France, Germany, England, and the United States so pre-entranced with communism, so ignorant of farming and industrial process, so self-blinded to horror and despair as to imagine, even after seeing some of it, that the Soviet Experiment offered hope to any man. Not being blind--being noncommittal at the outset--we had seen better. Wait till we get home, Ted and I told them. We'll put the truth in America's magazines. Police state. Prison. Human abattoir. Endless steppes of horror. Perversion of the mind. Destruction of the spirit. A factory of torture to keep the factories running. Hunger and helpless hatred. Dirt. The old, old, old abomination in new clothes: tyranny. We'll tell them. It began, after that. The GPU men everywhere we went--pretending they spoke no English and reddening when Ted and I blasphemed and insulted them in their hearing. The trip to the tea plantation in Batum--on a bus that deposited its other passengers and started up a series of hairpin turns--with a driver and Ted and myself on board. The slide--the driver jumping out. Ted and I jumped, too--but the bus didn't go over the cliff. It merely caught on the edge and hung there. (Was the driver chagrined because it failed to go over--or because we jumped also--or because he had steered so incompetently? How could you tell?) Odessa. The bartender offered us a bottle of Scotch--the first we'd seen in the long, grim way from Leningrad. We drank some and gave the rest away. And took the night train for Shepatovka, exulting in the thought that we would never see the UCCP again, come the morrow. There was no water on the train. All night, we turned on the hard boards.