It is Derbend that is the gateway between Europe and Asia, Derbend, perched like an eagle high among mountains that guard dramatically the passes to productive Baku, and the plains. Through this ancient gateway of narrow, goat-like defiles, the invading Mongols came. And the Scythians. Through this same ancient Pass of Derbend, Mithridates the Great, with his entire army, disappeared, as if by magic, from astonished eyes of the pursuing Greeks. Here Dumas the Elder came when he was rich with years and honors. He was accompanied by Moynet, the artist, who was at work upon his now famous book of costumes. They spent several years together in Russia. When Dumas started home for France, he sailed from Baku, after having explored both Crimea and Caucasia. But he was forced to wait several days for a steamer. Moynet put in his time sketching the old Tartar town, while Dumas finished the novel called _Ball of Snow_, then he hunted ducks, and arranged his Russian cook-book, remarking while he worked upon it, that the French were the only people who still knew how to dine, and converse. Young Prince Bagration joined them here. It was his mother who had once been mistress of the Great Metternich, and one of the first woman spies whom that statesman employed. Dumas started for Baku from interior Russia, from Novogorod, to be exact. Here the connoisseurship of Dumas was delighted by two jewels made of iron, a ring and a bracelet, which he considered gems of metal work. On inquiring about their origin, he was told that they had been made by Bestushev-Marlinski, the Russian poet, goldsmith, romancer, artist, and member of the epoch-making Decembrist Conspiracy, while in Siberia, where he had been exiled for life, by Nicholas the First. The jewels were the property of Countess Annenkov, and had been made from the hand-cuffs and shackles of her handsome husband, Count Annenkov, likewise condemned to exile. Countess Annenkov was a French woman, of humble birth, who had followed Count Annenkov, then her lover, to the mines of Siberia. About this incident Dumas made another novel, _The Master of Arms_, and the story related in it is true. Some of the finest descriptions of Petersburg in the last days of Alexander, in any language, are in this book. From Novogorod, Dumas and his cook-book journeyed happily southward, and at length came to Derbend of the Iron Gates, the city from which the astounding Tartar Wall starts wandering prodigiously over great mountains, and unscalable hillsides, proving, beyond doubt, the blood-kinship of its ancient builders with the race that conceived and executed the great Wall of China. He tells us his first warning that he was approaching the historic gate between the old world of the perishing East and the new commercial, more enterprising world of Europe, was a Tartar cemetery, perched upon an amphitheatre-like hill overtopping the Caspian Sea. Prince Bagration, who was still accompanying him, exclaimed: