By night the boys had descended so far that the air was soft and warm, and they did not need to seek a spot that was sheltered from cold winds. They chose a level place and spread their blankets in the open, with only the blue sky overhead. It was very different from their camp of the previous night, and, indeed, as they lay on the ground looking up at the twinkling stars, it did not seem possible that such a transformation could be reality and not a dream. The boys, however, did not take much time for star-gazing, and the aching of their muscles all over their bodies assured them that what they had gone through was no dream. Their prodigious exertions of the previous days culminated in overwhelming fatigue, and they had hardly more than lain down when sleep made them oblivious of everything. Sidney and Raymond had camped out so much, and so rarely with anything more than blankets to place between them and the earth, that they could sleep on any spot, however hard. If their bed were free from loose rocks they asked nothing more. Sleep, such as they had that night, is a great restorer, and in the morning the boys felt equal to anything that might be ahead of them. The travelers observed no habitations on the south slope of the range, and in fact the descent was so short and so precipitous that it would have been impossible for any one to make a home there. Even the hardy tribes who had established villages in the almost inaccessible mountains of Daghestan would not have had the temerity to attempt a colony on the opposite slope of the Caucasus. By noon of the next day, however, the boys had reached the upper margin of the beautiful valley of the Alazan: a valley where the dwellers conducted water wherever they pleased, and that was made luxuriant by the stimulus of irrigation under a warm sun. There the languid air of a semi-tropic early autumn was laden with the fragrance of ripening grapes. A luscious late crop of figs hung heavy on their stems, and pomegranates had burst their rinds to show the crimson kernels within. In groves of glossy dark orange trees golden globes gleamed amidst the rich foliage, and the ashy green of the olives was set thick with the black of ripened fruit. All was luxurious warmth, abundance, and peace, and seemed to the boys, after the rugged, sterile mountains over which they had toiled, to be a veritable Happy Valley. The travelers found the people whom they encountered to be very different from the stern inhabitants of the rugged mountains of Daghestan. Indeed, such a type would have been impossible in the languorous air of the Southern valley. The Georgians appeared a mild, gentle folk, and much more fair of face than their neighbors across the mountain barrier.