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There you shall again become a maiden, fairer than ever before, and shall marry the king of that country. And from your race shall spring the hero who will break my chains and set me free." Centuries passed and then a great hero, Hercules, came to the Caucasus Mountains. He climbed the rugged peak, slew the fierce eagle, and with mighty blows broke the chains that bound the friend of man.
Homesteads and roads, rivers and brooks, fruitful fields and haystacks, windmills with long revolving arms, carts and wayfarers, all vanish behind us, and twilight and night four times envelop huge Russia in darkness. At last the mountains of the Caucasus appear in front of us, rising up to the clouds like a light-blue wall.
For instance, once, after reviewing the Caucasus from Khassav-Urt to Novorossisk, and from Batum to Derbent, and, during the review, crossing the mountain range by three different routes at least, he remarked with a disparaging smile: "I suppose the Lord God made the country." "You do not like it, then? How should I? Good for nothing is what I call it."
From Paris we started for Munich, but we did not stop there, we happened to feel like going on. So we went through to Constantinople, whence we took a boat to Batoum and went up into the Caucasus, which Eleanore had heard about once from an engineer friend of her father's. I remember Koutais, a little town by a mountain torrent with gray vine-covered walls around it.
And this is why the path southwards to the east of the Aral was, in matter of fact, the path of civilization, and that by the Caucasus the path of barbarism; this is why the Turks who took the former course could found an empire, and those who took the latter have remained Tartars or Turcomans, as they were originally; because the way of the Caucasus was a sheer descent from Turkistan into the country which they occupy, but the way of the Aral was a circuitous course, leading them through many countries through Sogdiana, Khorasan, Zabulistan, and Persia, with many fortunes, under many masters, for many hundred years, before they came round to the region to which their Turcoman brethren attained so easily, but with so little eventual advantage.
Her sorrowful eyes looked once more at the suffering hero on the peak, and then she turned and began her long and tiresome journey to the land of the Nile. Ages passed, and at last a great hero whose name was Hercules came to the land of the Caucasus.
About ten o'clock in the morning, the young Livonian, leaving her cabin, appeared on deck. Michael Strogoff went forward and took her hand. "Look, sister!" said he, leading her to the bows of the Caucasus. The view was indeed well worth seeing. The Caucasus had reached the confluence of the Volga and the Kama.
The Russians are already threatening it, and I do not think they are near stopping. The base of their operations will be in the Caucasus, where they already have very considerable forces. It is true that their finances are in bad order; but this may perhaps be an additional motive to them to undertake a war of conquest.
When angry, he showed his teeth like a wolf, and his features seemed to grow sharp and set. "Maxime, you know nothing about life in the Caucasus; so you had better hold your tongue!" he shouted. All my arguments were powerless to shatter his naive convictions. What was clear to me seemed absurd to him.
The Siberian and Turkistanian army corps must be deducted, as they would certainly be left in the interior and on the eastern frontier. For the maintenance of order in the interior, it would probably be necessary to leave the troops in Finland, the Guards at St. Petersburg, at least one division at Moscow, and the Caucasian army corps in the Caucasus.
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