“One God,” he said.  “And two men underneath.  Two men, one soul.”

He looked at me benevolently and pointed to his heart.

“Two men, one soul,” he repeated, and crossed himself.  “You understand?”

“I understand.”

Then he added finally, “Turn the lamp as high as you like,” and suited the action to the word by turning it so high that one saw a dense cloud of smoke beyond the lurid flame.

“Good-night!”

“Good-night!”

My queer guardian angel disappeared.  I fastened the door so that it should not swing in the wind, and then climbed back into my wire hammock, stretched out my limbs, laid my cheek on my pack, and slept.

Nothing disturbed me, though I woke in the night, and looking round, missed the Ikon lamp which would have been burning had I been in a home.  It was a saint’s day.  The absence of the Ikon told me the difference between sleeping in a house and sleeping in a home.  Perhaps it was because of this difference that my host blessed me so earnestly.

Next morning I sought my host in vain.  He had apparently left the town before dawn with a waggon of produce that had to be carted to Tuapse.  At breakfast in the Turkish coffee-house I looked with some amusement at the bread and carrot, discarded the latter, but munched the former to the accompaniment of a plate of chicken and a bottle of wine.  My imagining, therefore, of the previous night was not altogether vain.  All that was needed was that my comical host should look in.  As it was, in his absence I drank his health with a Georgian.

IV

SOCRATES OF ZUGDIDA

I was travelling without a map, never knowing what I was coming to next, what long Caucasian settlement or rushing unbridged river, and I came quite unexpectedly to a town.  I had not the remotest idea that a town was near, and when I learned the name of the town I realised that I had never heard of it before—­Zugdida.

This is no fairy story.  Zugdida veritably exists, and may be found marked on large maps.  I came into it on a Sunday evening, and found it one of the largest and most lively of all the Caucasian towns I had yet visited; the shops and the taverns all open, the wide streets crowded with gaily dressed horsemen, the footways thronged with peasants walking out in Sunday best.  A remote town withal, not on the railways, and unvisited as yet by any motor-car—­unvisited, because the rivers in these parts are all bridgeless.

I was looking for a place where I might spend the night—­towns are inhospitable places, and one is timorous of sleeping in a tavern full of armed drunkards—­when I was hailed by a queer old man, who noticed that I was a stranger.  He kept one of the two hundred wine-cellars of the town, and was able to give me a good supper and a glass of wine with it.  He was an aged Mingrelian, bald on his crown, but lank-haired, dreamy-eyed, stooping; he had a Robinson Crusoe type of countenance.  I had come to one of the oldest inhabitants of Zugdida, an extraordinary character.