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64 ARMENIA AND THE NEAR EAST
great valley, there is an ancient cave-town, Vardzia, hewn out
of the face of the cliff. Probably this dwelling-place was
originally inhabited by a primitive race who lived in caves.
Later on, in the Middle Ages, a famous monastery was
established here, with numerous cells and big chapels cut out
of the rock. According to popular belief this lonely place
was Queen Thamara’s favourite resort ; she had the cave
monastery enlarged, and a large church hewn for the Mother
of God, where several frescoes can still be seen, one of them
being said to represent the great queen herself. In the
fourteenth century this inaccessible place was sacked and
destroyed by Timur Lenk and his Mongol followers, who got
into the caves by means of ladders let down from the top of
the clifTs. Two hundred years later the monastery was
pillaged again, this time by the Persians.
Georgia is a small country, and the great plain around the
Kura occupies a large part of it ; nevertheless, this remarkable
country has every kind of natural beauty—fertile plains, large
solitary forests, wild glens with luxuriant vegetation, high
rugged mountains, white glaciers, and picturesque seaports.
One important feature only is lacking : lakes. Strange to
say, there was never any fully developed glacial period, with
an extensive and continuous sheet of ice, in the countries of
the Caucasus. Consequently the valleys have escaped being
hollowed out by glaciers, and instead of being U-shaped, are
usually of a narrow V-shape, excavated by water ; there are
not a few deep canyons or gorges with perpendicular sides ;
whereas lake-basins, like those that were hollowed out in
Norway or Switzerland, do not exist. The Georgian land
scape has no blue lakes to reflect the immensity of the moun
tains. There is only one small district with some lakes,
situated in the Little Caucasus mountains in the south-west.
Originally, however, the Kura must have flowed through
a series of large lakes, the bottoms ofwhich now form extensive
fertile plains, narrowing at the end where the valley contracted
and the river gradually cut deep gorges, thereby emptying
the lakes. There is one cutting of this kind atMtskhetha and
another at Tiflis. The wide plain wc were travelling through
was a characteristic example of what once was the bottom of
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