Algernon Blackwood

“ I think, you know, the power of the place got into him a bit⁠—you can believe anything,” he explained apologetically, “in the Caucasus⁠—and just across the next ridge was a settlement of Ossetines. The Ossetines are said to be older than the Egyptians, and no one knows exactly where they come from; they worship the soil, pray to heaps of earth, with the idea that it expresses deity or something, offer salt and milk to open places in the ground, and all that kind of thing. They’re a wild lot, too. ”

“ You’re an earth-person. You ought to feel what I feel. I think you do!’ That ‘glassy essence,’ you know, is in Measure for Measure, only I forget the whole quotation. And then he said excitedly, ‘The worship of these Ossetines up here has done it. The place is all stirred up. ”

“ It was last year, when I was in the Caucasus⁠—the Lesser Caucasus, some 50 miles southeast of Batoum, where there are copper mines, first worked by the Phoenicians ages ago, but covered now by a forest of rhododendrons and azaleas. The ore is visible to the eye, and they get it out with pickaxes. It’s a marvellous country, wild as ever it can be, and the men wilder still, a difficult crew to manage, Georgians, Persians, Tartars, all Mohammedans, and all free with knife and pistol. ”

“ I had no trouble with the men at all, and the Ossetines I only saw⁠—er⁠—this once. My American engineer was the bother, with his imaginative talk of nature-spirits, his seeing things about the mountains, and all the rest. The Caucasus just there is not exactly the place to talk that kind of stuff. ”