Their ride was continued over a high plateau, on which huge rocks, rugged and curiously wrought, the remains of shattered peaks, stood in their awful grandeur; carrying back the imagination through the dim shadows of the past to a period long before the present forms of life existed, and speaking eloquently of the vast changes which earth has undergone. Their aspect was often that of colossal castles, grim with tower and battlement, which fancy peopled with the demons of the mountain and the wilderness. But the travellers could not stay to study them; signs of a terrible tempest were visible, and they dashed forward at a hard gallop to seek shelter in the valley of the Tschugash. A group of cedars, with a patch of smooth turf, was found on the river bank, and there they bivouacked. The night passed without accident or adventure; and early next morning they were again on horseback, and across ridge and valley, through scenes of the strangest picturesqueness, pursued their track. Across ridge and valley, but in a lofty region always—just below the line of perpetual snow, but above the region of vegetation; the eye unrelieved by branch of moss or blade of grass; until, towards evening, they descended into the valley of the Arriga. Then they wound over a low wooded ridge, and struck into a rugged pass, at the head of which they encamped for the night. The tents were pitched; a huge fire blazed; and the hunter having shot a very fine deer, a savour of venison speedily perfumed the cool night air. What with venison and wodky, the travellers feasted gloriously, and the echoes rang with the wild songs of the Kalmucks. The morning came, and with it the signal “Forward!” They ascended the bank of the Arriga to its source—a small circular basin of about thirty feet diameter, at the foot of a precipice seven or eight hundred feet in height. The basin was deep, with a bed of white pebbles; the water, clear as crystal, issuing forth in a copious stream, rolled downward in a series of small and shining cascades. The path, from this point, lay across a high mountain, the upper part of which was deep shrouded in snow, and it toiled up to the summit in about a hundred bends and curves; a summit like a razor-back, not more than twenty-five feet wide. The ascent was arduous and perilous, but still worse the descent on the other side, owing to the exceeding steepness. Accomplishing it in safety, Mr. Atkinson found himself in the valley of the Mein. The river rises at the foot of a precipice which reaches far above the snow line, and winds its course through a morass which, in the old time, has been a lake, shut in by a barrier of rocks, except at one narrow gap, where the little stream finds an exit in a fall of about fifty feet deep. At the head of the lake is another cataract, which throws its “sheeted silver’s perpendicular” down the precipice in one grand leap of full five hundred feet.