A Hero Of Our Own Times - pg. 3

It was a glorious place, that valley. Mountains on all sides, inaccessible reddish cliffs, hung with green ivy and crowned with clumps of oriental plane; yellow slopes streaked with ravines; and there, at a great height, the golden fringe of the snows; while below was the Aragva (joined here by another river whose name I cannot recall),thundering forth from a black gorge filled with mist, to become a silver thread which glittered like the scales of a snake's skin.