'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎63] (94/714)

FROM LONDON TO ASHKABAD 63
at Batum. They are being advanced with a strenuousness and a
purpose that sufficiently indicate the value set by Russia upon this
maritime key to her Caucasian base. Five large forts some of
Eussian them not yet completed—command the shore line, and
mihtary are a l rea( ly mounted with over twenty guns of heavy
sitions calibre. The principal battery, in the centre of the town,
immediately overlooking the harbour, contains twelve guns of. it
is said, from eighteen to twenty-two tons each. All strangers, and
even Eussian civilians, are strictly excluded from its precincts.
Practice was proceeding, on the day that I left, at canvas targets
moored out at sea. Higher up on the side or summits of the first
range of hills behind the harbour, four other batteries are being,
or have been constructed, armed, for the most part, with mortars.
The permanent garrison of Batum is three battalions, kept at their
mobilized strength of 1,000 men each. At the time of mv visit
four other infantry battalions were in the immediate neighbourhood,
engaged in constructing a military road into the interior up a
valley where it will be masked from marine attack by the inter
vening hills. These details will show that Russia is keenlv alive
to the importance of her new acquisition; and that, should a naval
armament ever steam up from the Bosphorus with hostile intent,
she is not likely to be caught napping at Batum. An interesting
commentary is thus afforded upon the complacent puerilities about
Batum that were the commonplaces of a certain class of English
politicians at the time of the Berlin Congress in 1878.
Nothing can exceed the beauty of the line of railroad from
Batum to Tiflis. Leaving Batum on the south, it describes a
Kailway semicircle round the town on the outside, and follows the
Batum to coast on the north for a distance of thirty miles in the
rriflis direction of Poti before it plunges inland into the valley
of the Rion, that ancient waterway of the Phasis, up which sped the
adventurous keel of the ' Argo.' The vegetation is almost tropical
in its luxuriance; maize is planted everywhere in the low lands;
and the hills are wrapped from foot to crown in a sumptuous forest
mantle. At every station, where are sidings, long lines of tank-
cars stored with oil crawl by like an army of gigantic armour-
plated caterpillars, and disappear down the stretch of rails just
vacated. Each portentous insect is laden with a wealth to which
that of the Golden Fleece was nothing, and which attracts to the
Phasis many a modern ' Argo' that would have struck Jason with