The View from Tamischeira. Richard Cumyn

      Whenever I am able to free myself from the obligations I owe my constituents, which is as often as possible without inviting censure, I travel abroad. Travel is crucial to the growth of the complete person. Vast distances and novel sensations scrape calcified deposits from the complacent ego, exposing it to the infinite strands connecting people, rocks, plants, and animal life on this shrinking orb. Invariably I return with fresh insight into particular difficulties on these honoured isles, after seeing how it is that another culture identifies and rectifies problems similar to ours.

      Thus from the Chinese I learned how they could feed so many people on so little, and based on my findings while in the Orient I devised a nutritious diet of cabbage, potatoes, and whole-grain bread with added chalk as a calcium source. From a shaman of the Brazilian rainforest I learned about the extraordinary healing powers of various herbs. The aboriginal peoples of Arctic Canada are able to live comfortably in frigid temperatures in rounded shelters built wholly of ice and snow, leading me to wonder this: if such a simple material can be harnessed there, might we not have overlooked a similarly abundant resource in England to help alleviate the housing shortage in our burgeoning cities? In this regard, putting aside all thoughts of leather-lunged wolves and poorly prepared pigs, my mind lit upon the potential of straw as a building material. And yet, taking nothing from the richness, the exhilaration of these my previous excursions—across the arid Sahara, through the jungles of wildest Borneo, along the newly uncovered cobblestones of long-lost Roman towns—I can say without reservation that until my voyage to the fabled land of the Transcaucasus, I had always returned to Westminster and to my constituency office fundamentally unchanged.

      My transformation was due in no small part to the majesty of the Caucasus Isthmus, a wild and beautiful girdle of land extending from the Black Sea in the west to the Caspian Sea in the east and bisected along that same axis by a range of mountains second only in grandeur to the Himalayas of Nepal. Had chance not given me the travelling companions it did, when it did, I believe I would be addressing you, Dear Reader, in a form not unlike that of my previous travel accounts. You would have open before you a reliable printed guide to one of the far-flung places of Earth, where countless strange languages survive in the hills and valleys, where blood feuds rage, sapping the populace of vitality for generations, and where hospitality afforded the stranger is unequalled. Rather, with the trip still warm and tumultuous in my mind, all my known moorings torn away as by a typhoon, I take the unprecedented liberty of exposing not only the deeds but the motivations of my companions as far as I am able to discern them. It is an incomplete, perhaps a never to be completed task. I know that I will never plumb the depths of Professor Reginald Aubrey Fessenden’s extraordinary scientific mind, nor will I ever feel the intensity of the love between the poet, Archibald Lampman, whose ghostly presence I felt at all times despite the fact that I had not nor would I ever have the pleasure of his acquaintance, and Miss Katherine Waddell. Of the three, she is the one I think about most often.

      The tsar had recently improved the Georgian Road connecting Europe and Asia, and it was my intention to follow it and to be open to any adventure that might befall me along its dark, winding path across the Caucasus Mountains. Although I am and will remain a pacifist, I can appreciate the effort with which Russia, having only the blunted Urals to call mountains, chose to fight so ruthlessly to secure this region. No doubt to control this most