Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/71

 among pine groves between sea and mountains, like our own Mount Desert in Maine. So popular has this watering-place become that the ship is sure to have numbers of passengers dis- embarking and embarking here. Among those who came on board were several who knew the Caucasus well, and could tell harrowing tales of bloody conflicts between Muhammadans, Armenians, and Russian Christians during the disturbed period that followed in the train of the Russo-Japanese war.

The hills of the Titan Caucasus began to loom up next day as we neared the eastern shores of the Black Sea and caught a distant view of Poti, the P basis of the Greeks. This town was once the emporium of the farther end of the Euxine, and held its position till supplanted, within our own times, by Batum, about forty miles lower down. For ages Poti was the port from which were trans-shipped to Greece and Rome the goods that had been carried from the Orient by the Oxus route and via the Caspian Sea across Transcaucasia. An incidental mention of this fact to a fellow-passenger turned the conversa- tion to the subject of trade with the East in antiquity. He told me of two old ruined forts between Sukhum Kalah and Poti, from which runs eastward a line of great wall, with rounded bastions, the whole matching the mighty rampart at Derbent on the Caspian, as will be described in the fifth chapter. One tradition, he said, ascribed its origin to Alexander the Great ; but another assigned it to the time of the Mongol in- vasion, the story being that it was built largely to protect the caravan trade that came westward from India. This was but another version of the reports which I knew were current con- cerning a colossal line of fortifications that start at Derbent, as will be mentioned below, and it showed how generally familiar is the tale regarding their common origin.

Daylight, next morning, found our vessel safely warped to the pier in the harbor of Batum, with the ridges of the rugged Caucasus forming a snowy background to the scene.

Batum has become what Poti might have developed into if its

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