Between Baku and Tiflis, the Caucasus Railway runs for the most part through a flat, uninteresting country.  Wastes as dreary and desolate as the steppes of Central Russia or the deserts of Turkestan sometimes stretched away to the horizon on either side of the track.  At other points were gray, verdureless slopes and rocky buttes, or saline mud-flats that looked like the old bed of some ancient sea.  Occasional oases of life appeared here and there, a few wheat-fields and a wretched mud-built village, or a picturesque scene of smoke-browned tents, gayly dressed nomads, and grazing flocks and herds.  At night we had passed through a grassy steppe, a facsimile of the rolling prairies of the West.  Though but the 6th of June, the country was parched, and the grass dried, as it stood, into hay by the heat and drought.  We saw at one point a wide sweep of flame that set the darkening sky aglow and caused the railway-rails ahead to gleam.  It was the steppe on fire—­another reproduction of a Far Western prairie scene.

All this had changed as we woke up an hour before reaching Tiflis.  The country became green, lovely, and populous in comparison.  The people seemed less ’ragged, poverty-stricken, and wretched; the native women wore garments of brightest red and blue; the men put on more style, with their long Circassian coats and ornamental daggers, than I had yet observed.  East of Tiflis, the Caucasus Hallway may, roughly speaking, be said to traverse the dreary wastes of an Asiatic country; west of it to wind around among the green hills and forest-clad heights of Europe’s southeastern extremity.  Lovelier and more beautifully green grows the country, and more interesting, too, grow the people and the towns, as our train speeds westward toward Batoum and the Black Sea coast.  Everything about the railway, also, seems to be more prosperous, and better equipped.  The improvised telegraph poles of worn-out lengths of rail seen east of Tiflis give place to something more becoming.  Sometimes we speed for miles past ordinary cedar poles, procured, no doubt, from the mountain forests near at hand.  Occasionally are stretches of iron poles imported from England, and then poles composed of two iron railway-rails clamped together.  For much of the way we see the splendidly equipped Indo-European Telegraph Company’s line, the finest telegraph line in the world.  Equipped with substantial iron poles throughout, and with every insulator covered with an iron cap in countries where the half-civilized natives are wont to do them damage, this line runs through the various countries of Europe and Asia to Teheran, Persia, where it joins hands with the British Government line to India.