MLETI stands on the White Aragva, a beautiful river of clear water, lifting thousands of white foaming ripples. A Russian poet has written:

The road goes through the valley of the Aragva for a distance of thirty miles through Pasanaour and Ananaour. I went on towards the first-named village, expecting to sleep there that night. But the unexpected happened. About two versts from Mleti I was sitting by the roadside when a priest came flying past me in a cart. He was shouting and singing, going downhill as fast as horse could carry him, and his long black hair streamed in the wind. Half-standing, half-sitting in the cart, he flourished a cudgel over the racing horse. When he saw me he made a movement to stop, but he was going too fast to pull up.

It was beginning to rain, and I promised myself to take shelter at the next inn along the road. I passed Arakhveti, a typical Georgian village, having an old church with a temporary tower of hay, and old hand-carved Ikons outside the door. There were a few cottages of the common type, having stone foundations and an upper storey of basket-work. A mile beyond this I came to a Dukhan, the first wine-house since Mleti. And there I saw the priest again.

He was sitting at a table outside the inn drinking wine with a party of Georgians. A pitcher was in the middle of the table and glasses all round. He hailed me and said he would willingly have driven me had he known in which direction I was going, and bade me sit down and drink wine. Asked from what province I came, I replied that I was English, which evidently made a great impression, though they immediately took the aspect of having met Englishmen every day of their lives. I subsequently learned that I was the first they had seen.

They spoke among themselves in the Georgian tongue, evidently discussing the democratic institutions of Great Britain, and then the priest said to me, “They keep us down, they don’t educate us; they forbid us to have schools; they call us savages. What do you think of us Georgians—aren’t we an unhappy nation? I myself am not an educated man. I finished the seminary, and then the Russian teacher said, ‘Georgian, that is a dog’s language,’ and I gave up learning. But these,” said he, pointing to his companions, “are as ignorant as the sheep, they know nothing. I proposed to build a school out of that old ruined barracks—it would have cost nothing; we ourselves could have built it, and I wrote a petition, but the Archbishop wrote back saying education wasn’t necessary.”

He bawled this speech at the top of his voice and shook his abundant black hair. His name, as I learnt afterwards, was Lavrenti Cham Khotadze; he was a handsome man, tall and strong, with red face and flashing eyes; his dense black eyebrows were too near together, so that when he was excited he looked mad. He had a fine long beard and a Roman nose. Over the wine cups he was certainly very uproarious, whatever he may have been in his church, and he emphasised his opinions by striking the table with his whole forearm. From head to foot he was enveloped in a dark blue cloak fastened with a belt at his middle.

A very dangerous political conversation ensued, and we drank a series of revolutionary toasts, one being that of the enemies of Russia—might they soon overcome her, and so let the Georgians gain possession of the Caucasus once more! They seemed to think that I might write to the English papers and fan up political animosity, and so help to bring about a European war, which would give the Tsar so much to do that the Caucasus would be enabled to gain its independence. They wished me to set the world on fire “to boil the Kaiser’s eggs,” as the saying is.

The rest of the party were well-dressed Georgians, but they did not enter into the conversation further than to confirm what the priest said. They were rather deficient in Russian. The priest himself a little discouraged the use of the Slavonic tongue, and made many malicious mistakes in his pronunciation when he used it himself. He constantly referred to the teacher who had called Georgian “sobatchy yasik”—dog’s language—and he said to me, “Did God mean all people to be alike, I ask you?”

I replied that I thought not.

“You are not a Mahometan,” asked one of the men; “you profess Jesus Christ; you are orthodox?”

I assented. “Orthodox” in Russia is as wide a term as “Christian.”

“Well,” said the priest, “God didn’t intend us all to speak the same tongue or He would have given all the same sort of faces. Now, look at my face, you can’t call it Russian.”

One of the party pulled a grey hair from the pope’s head, and there was much laughter. But one of the men said to me seriously:

“Don’t think that we are irreverent; we are only joking, we are so happy to have met you.”

This man was a carpenter and he put his personal case to me.

“Now, I am a carpenter,” said he. “My father was a carpenter; we make no progress. Motor-cars come along the road. I don’t understand them, but it is possible to understand them. If they taught me mechanics I could make them. Motor-cars weren’t made by God, were they? They weren’t even made by generals. Working men like myself made them. And haven’t I got eyes, hands and brain as they?”

This was truly a beautiful utterance of its kind, and said with a touching simplicity that won the heart.

Uproarious Lavrenti rushed on:

“And the war against Japan which cost millions! What do you think of their making the Caucasians pay taxes? Why should we pay; did we order the war? Did we fight it? Let those who ordered pay. Now, if they’d sent me instead of old Kuropatkin, you’d have seen.”

We drank a few more toasts and then it became time to go. There was one round more in the pitcher; the priest poured out a glass each and we all stood up whilst the last toast was proposed.

“The Mother of God save us!”

We drank it solemnly, but I heard one man add “some time or other.” Whereupon the priest laughed whimsically.

Lavrenti asked me to accompany him in his cart and sleep the night at his house. On the way he showed me his church—a chaste white chapel with a little green dome; it holds a hundred people, never more, and had been built in the ancient time when Rurik was Tsar of Russia. It has its own Georgian Ikons, though the Russians have taken out the precious stones.

His village was Nadiban. We did not get there before dark, but I heard the music of the guitar, and saw the youths and maidens of the village dancing the lezginka. I went into the poverty-stricken dwelling of the pope and saw his many little children. It was evident that his wife grumbled at him for bringing me home, and indeed there was no accommodation for visitors. The poor woman felt shamed. They made a bed up for me in a manger of the stable, and Lavrenti apologised, quoting that somewhat out-of-date proverb that “poverty is no sin,” adding that Christ Himself had slept in a manger, and so perhaps I would not object. His wife sent in a pillow and a quilt. I wrapped myself up in my bed, and despite the snoring of a sheep with a cold, and the attempts of an ox to browse off my toes, I slept the sleep which is often denied to the just.