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speculators’ shops, never stop to look enviously at the objects that perhaps they once owned. They seem to have forgotten Things.
    Only an occasional foreigner off a steamer in the harbor goes into the old man’s shop, to haggle for this trinket or that, to buy jewels to resell in Europe, or in back rooms behind locked doors to paw over furs or rugs that can be smuggled out of the country only after endless chaffering and small bribery. The boat the night before we got to Batum was full of talk of this and that which might be picked up for nothing, pour un rien, per piccolo prezzo. People scrubbed up their wits, overhauled their ways and means, like fishermen their tackle the night before the opening of the trout season.
    As one glances into the houses strolling through the tree-shaded streets of Batum one sees mostly high empty rooms, here and there a bed or a table, some cooking utensils, a scrap of mosquito-netting or a lace curtain across an open window. All the intricate paraphernalia, all the small shiny and fuzzy and tasseled objects that padded the walls of existence have melted away. Perhaps most of them went in the war under the grinding wheels of so many invading and occupying armies, the Russians, the Germans, the British, the Turks, the Georgian Social-Democrats and lastly the Red Army. After these years of constant snatching and pillage, of frequent terrified trundling of cherished objects into hiding-places, seems to have come apathy. People lie all day on the pebbly beach in front of the town, with their rags stripped off them, baking in the sun, now and then dipping into the long green swells that roll off the Black Sea, or sit chatting in groups under the palms of the curious higgledy-piggledy Elysium of the Boulevard along the waterfront. With half-starvation has come a quiet effortlessness probably sweeter than one might expect, something like the delicious sleep they say drugs men who are freezing to death.
    And the poor remnants of what people persist in calling civilization lie huddled and tarnished and dusty in the windows of second-hand dealers, Things useful and useless, well made and clumsily made, and little by little they are wafted away west in return for dollars and lire and English pounds and Turkish pounds that lie in the hoards with which the dealers, the men with the eyes of dogs frightened on a garbage pile, await the second coming of their Lord.
    2. The Knight of the Pantherskin
    There is a bright sliver of the moon in the sky. On the horizon of a sea sheening green and bright lilac like the breast of a pigeon a huge sun swells red to bursting. Palm-fronds and broad leaves of planes sway against a darkening zenith. In the space of dust outside of their barracks Georgian soldiers are gathered lazily into a circle. They wear ragged greyish uniforms, some with round fur caps, some with the pointed felt helmets of the Red Army. Many of them are barefoot. Blows off them a sweaty discouraged underfed smell. One man, seated, starts thumping with his palms a double shuffle on a small kettledrum held between his legs. The rest beat time by clapping until one man breaks out into a frail melody. He stops at the end of a couple of phrases, and a young fellow, blond, rather sprucely dressed with a clean white fur cap on the back of his head, starts dancing. The rest keep time with their hands and sing Tra-la-la, Tra-la-la to the tune in a crooning undertone. The dance is elegant, mincing, with turkeylike strut-tings and swift hunting gestures, something in it of the elaborate slightly farded romance of eastern chivalry. One can imagine silver swords and spangled wallets and gaudy silk belts with encrusted buckles. Perhaps it is a memory that makes the men’s eyes gleam so as they beat time, a memory of fine horses and long inlaid guns and toasts drunk endlessly out of drinking horns, and of other more rousing songs sung in the mountains at night of the doughty doings of the Knight of the