Slowly and carefully we made our way down the steep side of the ravine, until we arrived at the bed of the stream that was to serve as road to take us back into the hill country. At this season the brown, turbid current, though it roared angrily over the many rocks and stones that impeded its course, was not deep, and, after the slipping and climbing we had had for the last hour, it was quite pleasant only to have to wade through water, notwithstanding the occasional splashings that it entailed.
This gorge was quite as narrow as that by which we had entered, and on emerging from its darkness and gloom into the brightness and verdure of the hills, we felt as Dante must have done when he returned to earth from his visit to the Inferno.
The stream partook of the character of the scene, and soon after entering the grassy plains and verdant woods became a pretty rippling river, though the masses of stones on each side its bed showed that its violence could be again excited by the winter rains.
A few versts from the town, on a steep grass bank, shaded by a picturesque group of beech, was a very pretty wooden house (the only habitation we had seen all day), something like a large Swiss chalet. The mother and family of the late Prince Dimitri Sherwasidzi, who died a few months ago, live here. The ladies, dressed in deep mourning, were sitting in the broad verandah. They wore black woollen robes, and had veils of the same sombre material wrapped round their heads. The dress was most funereal. The tall, slender women, with their gloomy drapery, that hung around them in heavy but graceful folds, looked like figures from a Greek frieze. Mourning here is very rigid. For three months after the death of the head of a family, the ladies see no visitors excepting near relatives. Every week the Princess Sherwasidzi, attended by her women, visits the grave of her son. For several hours they weep and mourn, casting ashes upon their heads with lamentable cries and screams.
Standing a little apart from the family dwelling is another similar but smaller house, entirely devoted to the entertainment of guests. Hospitality is much esteemed and largely practised by the upper class of Circassians. No greater praise can be awarded than to say that a man "keeps forty tables."