Sport in the Crimea and Caucasus

by Clive Phillipps-Wolley

The women of the house had retired on our entry, and for the whole of our sojourn with these people, they remained in a kind of outbuilding attached to the cottage, vouchsafing us only a rare glimpse of two very pretty faces, which were lost to sight in the folds of their envious mufflers almost before they were seen. After the chicken and rice had been cleared away, two little Lesghian boys came in to have a look at their father’s guests; and never in my life have I seen such sturdy, handsome youngsters as these two sun-browned little shepherds of seven and eight respectively. Early in the morning, before the sun had risen, these two young mountaineers were astir, waked by the bell of Shaitan, the long-bearded chief of their herd of goats. With crooks in hand, in rough togas of sheepskin, I watched the fine little fellows leading their hundred or more goats up steep mountain tracks, to pastures that hung far above the hamlet in the glen; and often during the day we caught glimpses of them and their charge on some precipitous pasture, or heard the distant notes of the rough flutes with which they amused themselves.

With such early training as this—taught at seven to rely on their own resources, and take charge of such wilful beasts as goats on a mountain pasture—it is small wonder that Lesghians have numbered amongst them such leaders as Schamyl and Mansur Bey. Nor is it wonderful that, passing year after year of their lives in the solitary grandeur of their own mountains, they become the priest-led, superstitious people they are. Schamyl the leader would have had but little influence had he not also been Schamyl the prophet, the divinely protected. I have frequently heard Russians say that the only reason that the Circassian war lasted as long as it did was, that it was the policy of Russia to keep the Caucasus as a training school for her young officers and raw recruits; but, though this has been often repeated by men who were in a position to know something of the matter, I would rather believe that the fiery zeal, tough sinews, and impracticable mountain homes of the Lesghians were the cause, than the calculating cruelty of their enemies. Be that as it may, the Lesghians of to-day—such at least as remain of them—are an honest race of sturdy mountaineers, who have little love for Russia, and concern themselves in no way with the outside world. Those with whom I stayed never travelled, even as far as Goktchai, more than twice a year, and, I daresay, don’t know yet that the Czar Alexander II. is dead. But the evil spirit that wrought his shameful murder was never cherished in a Lesghian or Tscherkess bosom, any more than in the breasts of his own Russian moujiks. I have known the common people of Russia for three or four years, and known some of them well: for it was ever my wont to put up in peasants’ huts, and share the moujik’s black bread when out shooting near his village, and I have never heard anything but love and respect for the Emperor from a poor man yet. The moujik and the Tscherkess of to-day are not as tongue-tied as some would have us believe; and very few indeed are the great men of Russia whom they do not detest and abuse; but the Emperor is still to them a loving father, in whose tender mercy—if they could only get at it through the crowd of officials who fence him round, and hamper the effects of his just will—the moujik entirely confides.

If those Russians with whom I have talked on Nihilism knew anything of the subject, the Emperor’s great mistake was not the freeing of the serfs—though by that he aroused the hostility of the wealthy boyar class—but the reduction of the fees of the universities to such a degree as to render a first-rate education possible to thousands who, in after life, would have to fill positions for which they were too highly educated, and in which their excessive education would only create discontent. Is it not just possible that the excessive education which we force upon the working classes of England at the present time may have a somewhat similar effect? I plead guilty to knowing very little of politics; but when I hear on all sides the complaint that domestic servants are becoming an extinct race, having grown too fine for the state of life to which (to quote the fine old catechism phrase) it has pleased God to call them; when I hear of the difficulty of obtaining agricultural labourers, or old-fashioned country servants; when every woman can play the piano, and none can cook a potato, I begin to wonder if education may not be carried too far, and whether certain classes would not be happier without it, and their work better done. There is an old adage that ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing;’ and even in England we cannot pretend to do more than give the working classes that ‘little knowledge’ which produces the ill effects that a perfect education might or might not cure.

But these are subjects beyond me, and I escape gladly to the mountain side. When the first pale ray of the dawn crept through the one tiny window of our ‘serai,’ we left our couches, and went down to lave our hands and faces in the icy waters of the mountain torrent below. During the night a slight fall of snow had made the valley white, and a sharp frost had grizzled the long beard moss on the mountain trees. We did not stay for breakfast, but just collected all our impedimenta, determining to do two hours’ climbing before sitting down to eat and drink, and fasten on those abominable iron claws, without which the rest of the climb would be impracticable.

For one like myself, but little used to mountaineering, the first two hours’ climb was very weary work; and when at last we stopped to rest and breakfast, the high peaks seemed further off than ever. Growing close to the boulder round which we breakfasted was a medlar-tree, whose half frozen fruit was deliciously refreshing after our toil. But Allai gave us little time to rest, so that having hurried through our meal, and spent a few minutes in watching the sun battling his way through the mountain mists, we fastened on the climbing-irons and pursued our way up steep slopes covered with forests of beeches, whose dry fallen leaves scattered from under our feet and revealed the treacherous black ice beneath.

Here we came on bear tracks, and heard the cry of the red deer in some beech woods on a neighbouring mountain side. As we peered over an abyss we caught sight of three ‘marral,’ as the natives call them, far out of shot on the other side. To get to them would have been a day’s work; so we could only look and long; while the wild cry of another stag, which we could not see, reverberated through the woods, and made our hearts jump at the sound. Far down in the abyss the wooded tops of smaller mountains rose like islands from a tumbling sea of clouds like those we call woolsacks at home; a sea that, as evening approaches, rises higher and higher, until the whole mountain top is submerged in its cold waves. But here above the clouds, out of sight of the earth which they hid, all was bright as an Italian summer, in spite of the snow and ice, until four o’clock in the afternoon. Here, beautifying the snowy forests by their presence, I found two varieties of primula: one, the commonest, a deep lilac; the other, a pure white; we also found some sweet violets, which, together with the primulas, made a handsome bouquet for Christmas time. The trees in the woods we passed through were almost entirely beech, everywhere covered with the beard moss, which gave them a quaint old-world look; amongst them were a few medlars and pears; while underfoot the blackberry briars made our upward progress difficult. Bracken and ‘trichomanes’ were the only representatives of the fern family which I noticed during the day.

On this our first essay on the mountain-side we only just reached the upper edge of the wooded belt, and it was here, when we had scarcely left the trees behind us, that I got my only shot during the day. Passing through a small recess in the mountain-side, where all was still dark and chill, the sun not having penetrated there since night left it, I heard a bound and a rustle, and a chamois gave me a fair running shot, of which I did not make the most, only wounding, and eventually losing him, after a day wasted in pursuit. So we turned back sore-footed and empty-handed, trudging down the mountain to the rising mist waves that crept up to meet us, and, plunging into them, felt for a time like men lost in the night, where neither the peaks of the mountains above, nor the fires of the valley beneath, were visible to us; where trees took weird shapes, like those in Doré’s pictures; where all was dank, and dark, and chill, so that a half wonder grew upon us as to whether anywhere down beneath a bright fire, cushions, and comfort could be waiting for us.

At last the house fires glimmered from below like stars through a night of fog, and hurrying on, slipping and stumbling over the wet grass, sliding off our greasy leather stockings to bump along for twenty yards or so on our aching shoulders, we reached our Lesghian house, and had soon forgotten (except when the hateful clamps caught our eye) all the petty tribulations which had interfered with our appreciation of the magnificent mountain scenery.

These Lesghians lead a happy life, though (or perhaps, because) a simple one. A flock of goats find shepherd’s work for the hardy handsome boys to do. A field of corn just above the house on a little table-land keeps the family in bread. A tree which grows in the crannies of the rock, in appearance like a small sloe-bush, supplies a decoction made from its root, and leaves so like tea as to have deceived me into believing that it was what it seemed. The industry of the women strews the floor with a superfluity of carpets, cushions, and mats; makes slippers for the men, cloth for such clothes as are not made of sheepskin, and a delicious drink from the medlars that grow on the mountain. The mountain sends them down the purest of water, finds them in unlimited fuel, and provides them with a dessert as varied as that of the richest Russian in the land: medlars, beechnuts, chestnuts, walnuts, pears, and berries of a dozen different kinds. Their religion forbids them to drink wine, so that, never having used it, they do not feel the want of it. Apples may be bought in the neighbouring village of the largest size and most luscious quality for threepence per hundred. Pheasants and red-legs abound, and are easily caught or shot (though I never heard of snares being used for them), while red deer and mountain sheep are for the bolder and stronger among the young men. Wild swine come all too close to the cornfield in autumn, and in slaying of these the Lesghian not only protects his harvest, but obtains leather of the best quality for his mocassins. Bear’s fat furnishes the lamps (made after the fashion of the sepulchral lamps of Greece) with fuel; and the rheumatic patient with an external application that beats Elliman’s embrocation out of sight; while those who suffer from colds take it internally, as English people take gruel, and, I dare say, with as good a result. From the beard moss the Lesghian makes a dye with which to stain his hands, and make them a manly brown, or ‘good fast washing colour,’ as the haberdashers have it; while if he be a dandy, he borrows from it a darker hue for his moustache, and for the solitary love-lock which his religion and his barber permit him to retain. Best of all virtues, the Lesghians are cleanly. In the whole of my stay amongst them, my night’s rest was never broken by the antics of insect gymnasts or the attacks of burlier foes.

The Sunday we spent in the mountain hamlet, each according to his own fancy. Allai went at dawn into the higher peaks to look for traces of game. Ivan spent his morning cross-legged on the floor washing clothes; and at mid-day we all three met on an eminence some two hours’ climb from the valley, to photograph some of the scenery with one of Rouch’s patent dry-plate apparatuses. On our way we met the village hadji, who was vastly interested, and promised to come in and see more of us and our photographs in the evening.