At the end of our toast the wine fairly leaped from the decanters, and everyone at the table stood up, and everyone insisted on touching his glass to the glass of everyone else at the table. And there was the intimate Georgian toast. Each man holding a glass links his arm with his neighbor’s arm and drinks from his own glass. The women leaned in from the kitchen, and around the entranceway the neighbors had gathered, and the wine decanters were passed out to them.

The Georgians we met are like the Welsh. In any group of, say, ten men, there would be at least seven fine voices. And at this table now the singing broke out, magnificent choral singing. They sang the songs of the Georgian shepherds of the mountains, and the old fighting songs. And the voices were so good, and the chorus was so good, that they seemed to be almost a professional group, and they were not. And then the tempo quickened, and two men took chairs, and turned them over their knees, and used them for drums, and the dancing started. The women came out of the kitchen and danced, and the men leaped up from the table and danced. And the music was the chorus of male voices, and the patted chair bottoms, and the clapping of hands.

It was magnificent dance music. Sometimes a man would dance alone, and sometimes a woman alone, and sometimes they danced together, in formal quick steps, traditional dances of Georgia. And this is how it was when we stopped for just a bite to eat and a glass of wine in a Georgian farmhouse. We had to tear ourselves away.

As our car dashed down the hills back to Batum, it began to rain again.

We were taking the train to Tiflis that night, and we were supposed to go to the theater before train time. And so heavy were we with fatigue, and food, and wine, and impressions, that the theater left not very much mark on us. It was Oedipus Rex played in Georgian, and our eyes were barely open enough to see that Oedipus was a handsome man with a flashing gold tooth, and that his red wig was magnificently red. He played on a staircase, up and down and up and down. He declaimed his lines with force and beauty. And when Oedipus beat his own eyes out, and tore his bloody shirt, our eyes were almost closed, and we propped them open. The audience spent half its time turning and looking at us, the visiting Americans. We were only a little less rare than visiting Martians here, and we couldn’t have appeared to advantage, for we were half asleep. Our host led us out of the theater, and pushed us into a car, and got us up the stairs of the train, and we were like sleepwalkers. We didn’t have any quarrel with the guard that night about open windows. We fell into our berths and went to sleep almost immediately.