Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol 6.djvu/115

 TIIR MAIN FIGHT. 71 tar in a north-easterly direction between naked chap. crags on either side ; and, though smooth, or _____ gently sloping home down to the brink of the precipice, it there ends at last with absolute suddenness in a sheer wall of vertical rock.* The cleft which divides the Kitspur from the lukerman Tusk is St Clement's Gorge. The English never treated Mount lukerman as Tiiebrush- -, ,. . . . 1 • T /• 1 • wood cloth- a deiensive position which (m order to leave its ing Mount Inkermau. assailants exposed to view and to fire) should be cleared of obstructions ; and (except upon spots neaT the camp, which had been stripped by men toiling after fuel •}-) the ground at the time of the fight was in most places clad with a stunted oak brushwood. This grew very scant on the top- lands, but abundant on most of the steeps. In some places, it reached a man's knees, in others, his waist or his shoulders, and in others again surrounded him with boughs 9 or 10 feet high. The high rock-built topland or spine of Mount Tho roafi? lukerman was so free from difficult steeps, so thinly coated with soil, and so sparsely inter- rupted by the there puny stems of the underwood, that guns once brought up to the brow could be easily moved on along the downs ; but Nature had placed graver hindrance in the way of ascent, and it was only upon roads made by man that istics of this spur, and it was only on seeing it in 1869 from the valley of the Tchernaya that I apprehended its singular form. t The parts of the bushes taken for fuel wei-e the roots These our soldiers used to call ' clumps.'
 * No maps or plans can adequately express the character-