A vagabond in the Caucasus

by Stephen Graham

INGOOSH WOMEN, WITH WATER-JAR

I knew he was without authority, and that the dapper little Russian officials in Vladikavkaz had three times his power. Though one would say they were but thirds of men, pitiable waste ends of men beside this proud cavalier, yet he was more amenable to the common law than they were. A hundred years ago would he not have been a king and they—slaves! But the wheel of fortune has turned.

The road onward was lined with the tombs of chiefs. I had walked about three miles before I came to the first of these; each grave was marked by a high stone, on which was represented, in red and blue painting, the estate of the deceased. The stones stood upright, because they marked the graves of Mahommedans; the tombstones of Christians lie flat on the ground. The name and fame of the deceased was set forth in characters resembling Georgian or Persian writing, and all around the writing were little paintings of the different things that marked him out as a nobleman—his swords, daggers, pistols, his belt and scimitar. Above the writing was shown the moon under which he died, and the star or stars. And underneath the writing and the martial emblems were little pictures of his domestic belongings, of his tea-kettle and his water-jar and his praying beads, gently and carefully drawn so that one loved mankind for the little dearnesses there. The painter had actually put in his goloshes and his jack-boots and the rug he slept on. On this first tomb, too, it was all arranged in the shape of a man; the moon represented his head, the stars his neck, the swords his arms, the jack-boots his feet, and the writing in the middle his body. It seemed to me that men had tried to gain the attention of God and had done this like children, wishing to be taken notice of. If there is a human God that comprehends our life He must smile at our dear ways. Man must be very lovable to Him.

I walked by many tombs and all were similarly marked; some were larger than others, and had many stones around for the traveller to rest upon. I took rest at noon and ate my mid-day meal and looked upon the scene. Near by, on a ridge, there were graves of another sort, a close-packed cemetery with hundreds of stones, and on them no emblems were painted and no names written. They were the graves of the retainers, of the nameless many. Six miles away, on a mountain, I saw the village of Fortoug. Thence the way wound indolently upward along the sides of gnarled cliffs. A thousand feet beneath lay the silver river. The scene was one of splendour and of strange, wild beauty. For a moment I was alone with myself. It seemed that the wild earth that is so shy of men had taken me to herself and had lost all her timidity. She was living as she does when no one is looking on. Earth is more beautiful than all women, more gentle than the timidest, more splendid than the grandest.... A pathos of longing came over me as if a cloud had crept into the sky; I was solitary; why was I here? What was happening in the other places of the world, in Moscow, in Lisitchansk, in London, on Ludgate Hill, in my English home? Why did man live in a scene and forget all the other scenes that existed at the same time? Why did I long to be conscious of the whole surface of life at once, to be, as it were, everywhere at home at once? The pathos of the present time is that it is breadth with length, infinite breadth, and that our scene is only one point on that infinite line. The Present Time is everywhere at once. Its duration is but for an instant, a minute, an hour, but its content is universal. It is more instant than light shed, it covers the worlds at once and is existent simultaneously to the ends of space, and it is as punctual on the furthest star as on the little mountain road where I am sitting. The blade of grass trembling at my feet has trembled just in time. Its movement is contemporaneous with the present time all over the world. The shadow which for a moment dwells over the valley, changing the little mountain rivulet which is tumbling down to the Terek from a warm, flashing, inviting stream to what appears a river of salt or ice, is the aspect of the present time made up for me by the gnarled and frowning cliffs, the mountain road, the heavy ox-cart upon it and the clumsy, patient oxen beating up the dust, the ruined castle on the mountain, with the cottages of Fortoug clinging to it like lichen, and the clustered gravestones on the knoll where the tribesmen lie buried, and the solitary tombs of the chiefs. It is made up for God, the universal eye, by—everything!

At Fortoug the whole village turned out to see me, and the old man of the place took charge of me and sat me in his best room whilst his daughter made dinner for me. And he had never seen an Englishman before, had never heard of them, the Inglechani, for that was how he translated the Russian word Anglichanin into his language. Where did my tribe lie? He was surprised not to have seen any of us in their valley before. I pointed north-west, beyond Elbruz. He nodded as if he understood, and then my meal came up—lamb cutlet and millet-bread—bread baked of millet-seed and very dry. Then the old gentleman showed me photographs of his four sons, fine fellows; they had all left home and gone he knew not where. He begged me to remain and rest as long as I pleased, and assured me I could find no further road into the mountains, and that the river was unfordable, and that I should have to return the way I came.

As I did not wish to rest or to take his advice about the road I thought it better to pretend I would return to Dalin-Dalin. That satisfied him. It did not occur to him that I should make a detour and follow the river course, path or no path.

II

As the sun was sinking I found a resting-place soon. I chose a pleasant grassy hollow sheltered by two boulders. It was above the road and just beneath a graveyard: I could see all that happened on the road without standing the chance of being seen myself. But in truth there was little to see, beyond an occasional horseman and an ox-cart now and then. Each man who came rested a little beside the tombs before going on, for the road was a stiff climb. At sunset a party of Mahommedans came and said their prayers, faced Mecca, bowed to the earth, kissed it, rose and bowed again.

Then the owls stepped out from their hiding-places in the walls of the rocks and flew for little stretches noiselessly, and shrieked at one another. The shadow after sunset had begun low and now was claiming the summits of the cliffs; presently it would rest upon the sky itself, and night would have come. One by one the stars appeared, and I lay in my sleeping-sack and looked up at them. It became a perfect night, lit by a bright moon and a myriad of clearest stars. There was a silent breeze and a freshness on its wings; I lay full stretched on the ground and fitted my body to the soft earth. One could almost imagine that the dead in the tombs all lay as I did and stared into the starry heaven: I looked at the railed-in village of the dead above me and down to where the large tombs lay. They did lie as the poet wished, “under the wide and starry sky,” and, to the dwellers in the villages, to be buried so was ordinary. They knew of no other life or death. They could not compare their stars with other stars, and therefore knew not of their beauty. I had seen the human stars lit on the Thames Embankment. It seemed very beautiful that the hand which wrote:

“Under the wide and starry sky