The Caucasians, like all mountaineers, are full of superstitions. Gods and devils haunt their mountains now as they did when the ancients only knew them as a part of misty Turan, the home of storm and evil, or at least the mountain men so believe. And what wonder? As Littledale stopped to scrape together a few more fragments with which to sound the abysses on either side of him, he noticed with a shudder a huge figure crouching in the mist beside him. As he sprang to his feet the awful shape reared up, and small blame to a level-headed and cool man if he did not remember, until his express was pressing against his shoulder, that there was such a thing as the spectre of the Brocken, and that this huge shape which followed and mimicked his every action was, after all, only his own shadow in the clouds.
It was long after this that, lying at the top of a ravine which had taken him an hour and a half to climb, he struck a light to find a few more pebbles and get a drink, and found as he bent down his own track of that morning.
He says the sight of it made him feel years younger, and those who have been in such tight places and found their way out of them will know the feeling; but it was 10 P.M. when he got back to his camp, and here are the last words in his notes: ‘Reached home a little after ten, had some food in bed, and registered a vow that I had done my last solitary scramble in the Caucasus.’
I have registered that vow many times, when cold, and starving, and dead tired, with hands and feet bleeding, and no massive ‘head’ to compensate me for my toil; but I have never kept my vow, and I venture to doubt whether my much more successful fellow-sportsman will keep his.
The great peaks are sorcerers whose spells no man may resist, and the feeling that every manly quality in you has been tried to the utmost, and has borne the strain, is worth more than all the cruel toil endured.
In conclusion let me say that there is so much confusion as to the correct classification of the Caucasian goats, that before venturing to publish this contribution I went for information to the British Museum, considering that the nomenclature used by that Museum should be the standard for British sportsmen. At the Museum I learned that on this particular subject even our savants are in some doubt, whilst in Russia the leading naturalists of St. Petersburg and Moscow disagree. However, Mr. Thomas courteously supplied me with the following definitions, which may be sufficient for present purposes.