It is now five o’clock.  I have no time to deliver myself in a remunerative torrent of descriptive phrases.  Let us hurry off to the railway station.

There is a crowd of Armenians, Georgians, Mingrelians, Tartars, Kurds, Israelites, Russians, from the shores of the Caspian, some taking their tickets—­Oh! the Oriental color—­direct for Baku, some for intermediate stations.

This time I was completely in order.  Neither the clerk with the gendarme’s face, nor the gendarmes themselves could hinder my departure.

I take a ticket for Baku, first class.  I go down on the platform to the carriages.  According to my custom, I install myself in a comfortable corner.  A few travelers follow me while the cosmopolitan populace invade the second and third-class carriages.  The doors are shut after the visit of the ticket inspector.  A last scream of the whistle announces that the train is about to start.

Suddenly there is a shout—­a shout in which anger is mingled with despair, and I catch these words in German: 

“Stop!  Stop!”

I put down the window and look out.

A fat man, bag in hand, traveling cap on head, his legs embarrassed in the skirts of a huge overcoat, short and breathless.  He is late.

The porters try to stop him.  Try to stop a bomb in the middle of its trajectory!  Once again has right to give place to might.

The Teuton bomb describes a well-calculated curve, and has just fallen into the compartment next to ours, through the door a traveler had obligingly left open.

The train begins to move at the same instant, the engine wheels begin to slip on the rails, then the speed increases.

We are off.

CHAPTER II.

We were three minutes late in starting; it is well to be precise.  A special correspondent who is not precise is a geometer who neglects to run out his calculations to the tenth decimal.  This delay of three minutes made the German our traveling companion.  I have an idea that this good man will furnish me with some copy, but it is only a presentiment.

It is still daylight at six o’clock in the evening in this latitude.  I have bought a time-table and I consult it.  The map which accompanies it shows me station by station the course of the line between Tiflis and Baku.  Not to know the direction taken by the engine, to be ignorant if the train is going northeast or southeast, would be insupportable to me, all the more as when night comes, I shall see nothing, for I cannot see in the dark as if I were an owl or a cat.

My time-table shows me that the railway skirts for a little distance the carriage road between Tiflis and the Caspian, running through Saganlong, Poily, Elisabethpol, Karascal, Aliat, to Baku, along the valley of the Koura.  We cannot tolerate a railway which winds about; it must keep to a straight line as much as possible.  And that is what the Transgeorgian does.