Along this Black Sea road in the autumn it would be impossible to starve, so lavish is Nature of her gifts.  Here are many wild fruits, plums, pears, blackberries, walnuts, grapes, ripening in such superfluity that none value them.  The peasant women pick what they need; the surplus is allowed to fall and rot into the soil.

I made my way to Ghilendzhik through miles of wild fruit-trees ranged in regular order.  It is said that once upon a time when this territory belonged to Turkey, or even before then, the land was laid out in orchards and vineyards, and there was not a square foot uncultivated.

I ate of wild pears and kisil plums.  The pears were more the concentrated idea of pears than that we take from gardens; the kisil plums, with which the bushes were flaming, are a cloudy, crimson fruit with blood-like juice, very tart, and consequently better cooked than raw.  My dictionary tells me that the kisil is the burning bush of the Old Testament, but surely many shrubs claim that distinction.

It was a glorious walk over the waste from Kabardinka to Ghilendzhik, with all manner of beauty and interest along the way.  I left the road and cut across country, following the telegraph poles.  In front of me fat blue lizards scuttled away, looking like little lilac-coloured dachshunds; silent brown snakes shot out of reach at the sight of my shadow; and every now and then, poking and grubbing like a hedgehog, behold a large tortoise out for prey like his brother reptiles.  This domiciled the tortoise for me; otherwise I had only associated him with suburban gardens and the “Zoo.”  Now as he hissed at me angrily I knew him to be a lizard with a shell on his back.  I picked up several of them and examined their faces—­they didn’t like that at all.  They have a peculiar clerical appearance, something of the sternness and fixity of purpose which seems to express itself in the jaws and eyes of some learned divines.

With what eagerness the tortoises scrambled away when I disturbed them.  They run almost speedily in their natural state.  I was amused at the strength of their claws, and the rate at which they tore a passage into a thicket and disappeared.

Half-way to Ghilendzhik there is a stone quarry, and there one may see thousands of what are called in England “Cape gooseberries,” bright berries of the size and colour of big ripe strawberries.  They peeped out shyly everywhere among the tall grasses and the ground-scrub.  Above them were stretches of saffron-coloured hollyhocks, a flood of colour, and with these as sisters, evening primroses, a great abundance.  Lilac and crimson grasshoppers rushed over them, jumping into the air and into vision, a puff of bright colour—­then subsiding into the greyness of the dust as they alighted and the sombre wing-cases closed over their little glory.  On the ground when waiting to spring, these grasshoppers looked as if made of wood:  they looked like displaced chessmen of ancient workmanship.