on his little whistle, and still the train
lingers; lastly, the engine toots, however, and we pull slowly out of
Tiflis. The town lies below us to the left, the River Kur follows us
around a bend, the train speeds through deep gravel cuttings, and when we
emerge from them the Georgian capital is no longer visible.

Between Baku and Tiflis, the Caucasus Railway runs for the most part
through a flat, uninteresting country. Wastes as dreary and desolate as
the steppes of Central Russia or the deserts of Turkestan sometimes
stretched away to the horizon on either side of the track. At other
points were gray, verdureless slopes and rocky buttes, or saline
mud-flats that looked like the old bed of some ancient sea. Occasional
oases of life appeared here and there, a few wheat-fields and a wretched
mud-built village, or a picturesque scene of smoke-browned tents, gayly
dressed nomads, and grazing flocks and herds. At night we had passed
through a grassy steppe, a facsimile of the rolling prairies of the West.
Though but the 6th of June, the country was parched, and the grass dried,
as it stood, into hay by the heat and drought. We saw at one point a wide
sweep of flame that set the darkening sky aglow and caused the
railway-rails ahead to gleam. It was the steppe on fire--another
reproduction of a Far Western prairie scene.

All this had changed as we woke up an hour before reaching Tiflis. The
country became green, lovely, and populous in comparison. The people
seemed less 'ragged, poverty-stricken, and wretched; the native women
wore garments of brightest red and blue; the men put on more style, with
their long Circassian coats and ornamental daggers, than I had yet
observed. East of Tiflis, the Caucasus Hallway may, roughly speaking, be
said to traverse the dreary wastes of an Asiatic country; west of it to
wind around among the green hills and forest-clad heights of Europe's
southeastern extremity. Lovelier and more beautifully green grows the
country, and more interesting, too, grow the people and the towns, as our
train speeds westward toward Batoum and the Black Sea coast. Everything
about the railway, also, seems to be more prosperous, and better
equipped. The improvised telegraph poles of worn-out lengths of rail seen
east of Tiflis give place to something more becoming. Sometimes we speed
for miles past ordinary cedar poles, procured, no doubt, from the
mountain forests near at hand. Occasionally are stretches of iro