Gudaout is encompassed by the highest Caucasus—­its only refuge is the sea.  It is a place most wonderful in the pageantry of dawn.  Picture my life of one evening and morning.  I left Gudaout at the dusk, and having bought myself a pound of purple grapes, strolled out along the dusty high road eating them.  I made my bed on the seashore, and slept away the aches and pains of a heavy day’s tramping.  Next day, in that sort of reflection of last evening which comes before the morning, I rose, for the coldest of October breezes had come down to me from the mountains.  The dawn was all gold—­a new dawn, I thought.  But when I stood on my feet I saw below the gold the lovely bosom of the East, a beautiful, soft bed of creamy rose.  It was an elemental sunrise, a veritable first morning.

Distant mountains lay wrapped in dissolving mists, and seemed like the multifarious tents of a great army encamped on a plain—­for the smooth sea was like a plain.  The chamber of the dawn seemed gigantic, the mountains having lifted up the roof of heaven higher than I had ever seen it before, the sea having taken it out to a far horizon.

I stood looking over the shore before sunrise, and far out in the bay were three high-masted feluccas, looking like ships of the Spanish Armada.  At the water’s edge, and yet silhouetted against the dawn sky, were Mahometans, washing themselves and praying—­stark, black figures in the strange light.

I welcomed the sun.

He rose swiftly out of the waters, and shone across the bay, lighting up all the mountains that closed in north and south.  He came full of promises, and after the coolness and damp of the night I had need of heat.  I lay on a bank and gleaned sunshine.  The morning came over the sea steadily, equably, like a good ship making for a sure harbour.

Then, ten miles from Gudaout, on a mountain, I looked out from the ruins of the Tower of Iver, over a vast resplendent sea, and saw below me the monastery of Novy Afon and all its buildings, looking like children’s toys.  That tower was a stronghold of Christianity in the third century, and it was strange to think that Crusaders and mediaeval warriors had looked out from the same tower, over the same glorious sea.  Assuredly from the watch-tower of ancient Time all buildings and man’s dwellings are but toys.  I thought of that when I rowed across the river Phasis, and drank coffee at Poti on the site of Colchis.  That Black Sea and that river were the same which Jason sailed with his heroes; and the Golden Fleece, those children’s toy, has now, forsooth, become a head-gear in these parts.

We all pass away, but the sea remains the same; and all our empires and literatures, arts and towns, crumble and decay, and are proved toys.  Our consolation lies in our unconquerable souls, our glorious after-life beyond this world.  But the sea has an immortality in the here and now.  I shall never understand its secret.