This long pass north of Tiflis is an archeologist’s heaven, for there are remnants of civilizations for thousands of years. High on the cliffs are the square holes of burial places of remote antiquity. The Soviet government’s diggers work all the time at their excavations. Only recently they found a gigantic oil jar filled with golden money—the army pay of an ancient king who had been attacked and had buried his treasure in this place. And everyday the diggers find artifacts that carry the history of Georgia back and back to unsuspected civilizations. In the light of this age, a pier of Pompey’s bridge is a comparatively new structure, and the hydroelectric dam is a real newcomer against this background of antiquity.

Capa lined up four objects that he wanted to get on one camera plate: the hydroelectric dam, a statue of Lenin, a fifth-century church, and the square hole of a Sumerian grave. But they wouldn’t let him photograph it, because most important of all was the hydroelectric dam, and a photograph of it was considered out of bounds.

We were wind-burned and weary in the evening, and the stomachs of Capa, and Chmarsky, and me were badly upset. We had been drinking a mineral water called Borjoom, which had a pleasant alkaline taste, and we only discovered after it had done its work that it was a mild purgative, and in the quantities we were drinking it, it was much more than a mild purgative. We were quite weak before we found out the cause of our difficulty.

In America there are many hundreds of houses where George Washington slept, and in Russia there are many places where Joseph Stalin worked. The railroad shops in Tiflis have against their outer wall a bank of flowers and a giant plaque proclaiming that in this shop Joseph Stalin once had a job. Stalin is a Georgian by birth, and his birthplace, Gori, about seventy kilometers from Tiflis, has already become a national shrine. We were going to visit it.

It seemed a long way in the jeep, for a jeep seems to go faster than it does. We went again through the windy pass, and out into farther valleys, and through other passes, until at last we came to the town of Gori. It is a town set among the mountains. It is dominated by what we would call a mesa, a tall lone, round mountain, in the middle of the town, and topped by a great castle, which once defended the town and was its place of refuge. The castle is now in ruins. This is the town where Stalin was born, and where he spent his early youth.