a majestic picture that opens to your gaze from a great height. If the Eiffel Tower, raised only a quarter of a verst above the surrounding surface of the earth, makes it possible to view the space at 70 and even 90 verticals, then what can we say about the heights of one and a half and two verticals above the nearest mountain peaks? Two and even three hundred turns along the ray of zrfn! I see ahead of you with the naked eye... Many mountains that struck you from below with their grandeur and inaccessibility, now, when you stand above them, seem insignificant. The valleys and plains, which stretched for hundreds of miles and along which you had to endure for several days, now, from above, seem small, merged and compressed into a narrow strip, through which it seems you can step over. This gigantic relief map, stretching for hundreds of miles at your feet, makes you wonder. Feel free to remember all the details that you experienced while moving through this space, as well as details regarding any point you saw from the physical, ethnographic, etc. side. So, for example, looking from a height of 11th. foot. near Elborus, to the north of the Caucasus Mountains along the Kuban-Terek watershed, one can survey (as it fell to the lot of the one searching for these lines at 12 noon on July 24, 1889) a space of thousands
Not square versts Closer to it, at a distance of 20-25 versts, are the rugged cliffs of Dagger and Bermamut, 8-9 thousand feet in height. To the right of the first mountain stretches for hundreds of miles the Malki valley with its warlike Kabardian inhabitants; right in the center you can see very far away the beautiful three-domed Beshtau and other peaks in the vicinity of the Caucasian mineral waters; Beyond it, the Stavropol province stretches to the horizon, with its vast meadows and fields covered with grain fields, several lfvfe - the heights of Stavropol, and also the lfvfe - valley of the Kuban, with its picturesque banks and noisy tributaries. Above this darkness in our time, leaden clouds stood low, probably abundantly shedding moisture on the ground and delivering long-awaited coolness to the civilian population... “And in each separate corner, we thought, there was its own special life, its own customs, rituals, its own mundane worries, insignificant suffering and joy!... How base all this is... and alien to what is here...
The grandeur of the visible picture, the peculiarity of the situation, the lightness of breathing in the purest air, the life-giving rays of the alpine sun - all this serves as the reason for arousing in a person to the strongest degree that cheerful feeling of communion with nature, which should be known to everyone who has ever experienced and enjoyed this state of mind in a good place in the middle of a meadow, steppes, etc. Only here, on the mountains, does this state reach a high wall of tension, becoming in intensity more fully consistent with the grandeur of the picture of nature and taking on its own special character. The whole organism, in the name of the previous and now accompanying promises, submits only to the beneficial action of the beauties of nature and never ceases to think about what relates to humanity living there, somewhere far and below, but feels that it is free from everything human, that it is free, like a bird, to fly to the heights and can enjoy calmly and in reverence something more majestic and beautiful, which is usually inaccessible to people... These are moments of true happiness, the most precious moments in life!... Whoever has experienced them once will never refuse to experience such a state again, will never think about going to worship a mountain shrine again.....
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]