e carpeted with grass. Freshfield's description of the
valley of the Terek above Kasbek will apply pretty generally to all the
valleys that descend on that face of the range: "treeless valleys, bold
rocks, slopes of forbidding steepness (even to eyes accustomed to those
of the Alps), and stonebuilt villages, scarcely distinguishable from the
neighbouring crags." But, austere and unattractive though these valleys
are, the same epithets cannot be applied to the deep gorges by which in
most cases the streams make their escape through the northern subsidiary
range. These defiles are declared to be superior in grandeur to anything
of the kind in the Alps. That of Darial (the Terek) is fairly well
known, but those of the Cherek and the Urukh, farther west, are stated
to be still more magnificent. And not only do the snow-clad ranges and
the ice-panoplied peaks which tower up above them surpass the loftiest
summits of the Alps in altitude; they also in many cases excel them in
boldness and picturesqueness of outline, and equal the most difficult of
them in steepness and relative inaccessibility.

_Hydrography._--Nearly all the larger rivers of Caucasia have their
sources in the central parts of the Caucasus range. The short, steep,
torrential streams of Mdzimta, Pzou, Bzyb and Kodor drain the country
west of Elbruz. The Ingur, Tskhenis-Tskhali, Rion and its tributaries
(e.g. the Kvirila) are longer, but also in part torrential; they drain
the great glacier region between Elbruz and Kasbek. The Rion is the
_Phasis_ of the ancients and flows through the classic land of Colchis,
associated with the legends of Medea and the Argonauts. The Lyakhva and
Aragva, tributaries of the Kura, carry off the waters of the main range
south of Kasbek, and other tributaries, such as the Yora and the Alazan,
collect the surplus drainage of the main Caucasus range farther east.
The other large river of this region, the Aras, has its sources, not in
the Caucasus range, but on the Armenian highlands a long way south-west
of Ararat. The rivers which go down from the central Caucasus northwards
have considerably longer courses than those on the south side of the
range, partly as a consequence of the gentler versant and partly also
because of the great distances to which the steppes extend across which
they make their way to the sea. The most important of these are the
Kuban and the Terek; but it is the latter that picks up most of the
streams which hav