In half an hour the eldest of the maidens enquired at the door whether we could receive the moursa, and when our host entered the room, he was followed by a train bringing coffee, biscuits, and fruit. The ladies shortly joined us, and then the princess with her suite of damsels appeared, dressed in out-door costume, for she was about to pay a visit to her daughter in the valley of the Salghyr. She wore a crimson velvet cap embroidered in gold, with a bright kerchief tied round the head, and askirt and sort of tunic of BrouSsa silk; for the Tatars greatly affect goods from the bazaars at Constantinople. Silks and carpets, their mirrors and toursous inlaid in tortoiecshcU and mother-of-pearl, tobacco, &c..
by Google are always Turkish; indeed they do not care to have Russian or foreign goods, although the poorer classes find them cheaper.
Nothing can exceed the good breeding, delicacy of attention, and courtesy we experienced during our short stay at Assanaza; and whea we took leave of our hosts, we felt as if we were parting from old acquaintances. The young attendants were veiy demonstrative towards the ladies as they, left the house, clasping them round the waist and bowing their heads quite low, a form of salutation we had seen for the first time.
From Karaless we drove to Tcherkess-Kerman, distant about three miles, to see the crypts that are in great numbers on an eminence several hundred feet above the road, and in a perfectly impregnable position. The more remarkable are at the south end, "where a series of" excavations appear to have been converted for purposes of Christian worship. In one we see an altar hewn out of the rock, in another a throne, and in the rest are graves, also hollowed in the rock and filled with human remains, other excavations having been employed as ossuaries.' The dwellers of this natural fortress, obtained their water supply at a spring reached by descending seventy-seven steps, in a diagonal shafl in the rock at the north end.
One cleverly executed excavation is in a nearly spherical piece of rock, which has rolled from the cliffs above to where it now lies, half-way down the eastern glacis. Two diminutive chambers \aA served, the one as a chapel, the other as the altar-piece, their walls having been covered with frescoes, on one of which it is possible to distinguish several figures on horseback, and among them Sl George
■ An anonymous Author, wriling in 1784, stales that th« Tatars p with pnd«, ts being thosg of enemies the)' hod»hin in ballk.
by Google
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]
slaying the Dragon. Beneath this picture is an illegible inscription in Greek characters.
In a narrow goi^e to the west of the crypt mountain is the village of Tcherkess-Kerman, where the Tatars occupy other ancient caverns, in front of which primitive habitations they have erected sheds or outer chambers. A tower on the cast cliff of this goi^e, said to have been built by the Turks, is now called Esky-Kerman, 'old fort.'
The stra^ling village extends the length of the defile to the valley of Kouk-agatch (?) at the south-west, where we dismounted and had literally to cut our way through dense undergrowth, to reach a chapel which the guide told us we should find at the angle of the rock that overlooks the valley at its junction with the gorge. Itwasatoilsomc ascent overground evidently rarely visited by man and after a scramble on the rocky summit, we got to the edge of the precipice to find ourselves separated from an isolated rock, in which we could see the chapel we had come so far to visit, but a crypt not easy to reach with safety, as the spring across the chasm might be attended by a false step. The interior is decorated with painted representations apparently in good preservation, due in all probability to their inaccessible situation. Our old guide assured us that no person within his recollection had ever entered it. In the fourteenth century, Abdoun Khan, a prince of Kabardah, passed over into the Crimea with his clansmen, a tribe of the Circassians, and settled in the valley of the Belbeck at a place now called Kabardah by the Tatars; they subsequently returned to the Caucasus and fixed their abode on the Kouban. Tcherkess- Kerman, ' the fort of the TcherkeFS,' was one of their fortified positions.