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4 ADVENTURES IN TIBET.
horizon, grow bigger on the view, and disappear again,
while the engine-crank thud-thuds unceasingly along the
gleaming metals. We turn our backs upon Vladikavkaz,
the little town up and down whose dusty streets I sauntered,
a newly-fledged student, in 1885. It was a dark, warm
night when we sped down to the greatest inland lake of the
earth, the Caspian Sea. The only sounds that broke upon
the stillness of the steppe were the groaning of the engine
and occasionally the shrill chirping of the crickets. Mean-
while lightning was playing round the summits of the
Caucasus as though a host of volcanoes were hidden in the
range, which the seas on either hand had not yet availed
to quench.
At Petrovsk we stepped on board a smart little paddle-
steamer, lying within the double piers, which clasp the har-
bour like the claws of a Brobdingnagian crab. We were not
long in getting across the bright salt water to Krasnovodsk,
the terminus of the Trans-Caspian railway. The blue-
green waters of the Caspian are, however, very treacherous.
Storms burst upon the lake from the deserts of Asia, or
swoop down from the summits of the Caucasus, even when
the sky is calm and bright, and with incredible fury churn
it into wildly-tossing waves. Not long ago a steamboat
started from the one side, but was never seen on the other.
Of its fate nothing is known with certainty ; it disappeared,
leaving not the slightest trace behind il.
Do not imagine, however, that it was with any feeling of
pleasure, after a boisterous voyage across the sea, that I
set foot on land at Krasnovodsk, or the Red Water. Any-
thing but that. Krasnovodsk is the very opposite of an
earthly paradise. It is a little hole of a place, with white
one-storied flat-roofed houses, and a couple of unpreten-
tious churches, girdled round by a ring of barren, crumbling
mountains and yellow sand-dunes—not a tree, not a blade
of grass, not even a drop of fresh water ! All the water to
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