No such name occurs in our best maps; but there is a place near the country of Mingrelia in Guria on the Black-Sea, named Batum, which may be here indicatedE. This place is called in the text Weisseburgh, signifying the White Town, otherwise named Akkerman or Akkiermann, Asprecastro, Tschetatalba, and Belgorod.

The recent history of Batum and Baku is a faint indication of what might be expected.

E. These Turks must have been the Persian ambassadors of Uzun-Hassan;E. This proposed route seems to have been through the province of Guria to Batum; and, from the sequel, to have returned to Georgia and Shirvan, passing through Derbent and the Caspian gates, or Daghisten, into western Tartary.

VII AT A FAIR One misty morning in late October I arrived at Batum, pack on back, staff in hand, to all appearances a pilgrim or a tramp, and I drank tea at a farthing a glass in the fair.

It has been brought on rickety lorries down the rutty tracks of the mountains, down, down into the lowland of Batum, where even October suns are hot.

In another part popular pictures are spread out, oleographs showing the Garden of Eden, or the terror of the Flood, or the Last Judgment, and such like; in another is a wilderness of home-made bamboo furniture, a speciality of Batum.

On one table at Batum I observed two moth-eaten rusty fezes, a battered but unopened tin of herrings in tomato-sauce, another tin half-emptied, a guitar with one string, a good hammer, a door-mat worn to holes, the clearing of a book-case, an old saucepan, an old kerosene stove, a broken coffee-grinder, and a rusty spring mattress.