It would be hard to find in any literature a song which breathes a fiercer, more indomitable, spirit of heroism than this. The mountaineer is dead; he can fight no more; his body lies in the black earth; but his freed soul is as proud, defiant and unconquerable as ever. He takes a fierce delight even beyond the grave in taunting the bullet which has killed him with having once been his slave; in reminding the earth which covers him that he has spurned it under his horses' hoofs; and in mocking and defying even death itself. They have destroyed his body, but nothing has subdued, or ever can subdue, the brave, proud spirit which tenanted it. That, and not the body, was the man's true self, and that still lives to exult over bullet, grave and death.
So far is the true mountaineer from being afraid of death, that he seems to take a savage pleasure in imagining it in its most horrible forms and dwelling upon its most repulsive and terrifying features, merely to have the satisfaction of triumphing over it in fancy. As an illustration of this I give below a part of another Chechense song called "The Song of Khamzat." Khamzat was a celebrated abrek, or Caucasian Berserker, who harried the Russian armed line of the Terek with bloody and destructive raids before and during the reign of the great Caucasian hero Shamyl. He was finally overtaken and surrounded by a large Russian force on the summit of a high hill near the river Terek, called the Circassian Gora. Finding it impossible to escape, he and his men slaughtered their horses, built a breastwork of their bodies, and behind this bloody half-living wall fought until they were literally annihilated. The song of which the following are the closing lines was composed in commemoration of Khamzat's heroic defence and death. Just before the final Russian onset he is supposed to see a bird flying over the field of battle in the direction of his native village, and he addresses it as follows:
O aërial bird! carry to Akh Verdi Mohammed, the ruler of Hikka, our last farewell:
Bid good-bye to our sweethearts, the fair girls of Hikka,
And tell them that our breasts are a wall which will stop the Russian bullets:
Tell them that we had hoped to lie in the graveyard of our native village,
Where our sisters would have come to weep over our graves,
Where sorrowful relatives would have gathered to mourn our death.
But God has not granted us this last favor: instead of the weeping of sisters,
Over us will be heard the growls of fighting wolves;
Instead of sorrowing relatives, here will assemble clouds of croaking ravens:
The ravens will drink up our eyes and the bloodthirsty wolves will devour our bodies.
Tell them all, O bird! that on the Circassian mountain, in the land of the infidel,
With naked sabres in our hands, we all lie dead.
The reader who merely sees this song on a printed page in an imperfect prose translation can form little conception of the thrilling effect which it produces when sung by an excited woman to the fierce wild music of the Caucasian highlanders amid a group of Khamzat's fiery and sensitive countrymen. Their faces flush with strong emotion, their hands close with nervous grip upon the hilts of their long kinjals, and their bright eyes slowly fill with tears of mingled grief, rage and pity as the excited singer wails out the dying words of their lost leader.
The heroic poetry of the Caucasian mountaineers is largely taken up with recitals of their freebooting exploits and achievements in the valley of Georgia, usually in the form of songs or ballads, which all breathe the same fierce, proud, cruel spirit. In the diction there is very little art. Rhyme, although it is known to the mountaineers, is seldom used, and their poetry is, as a rule, nothing more than rhythmical or blank verse broken into irregular stanzas of from seven to eleven metrical feet. This kind of verse they improvise with great readiness and facility. It seems to be the form of expression which their stronger feelings naturally take. I have heard an Avarian mother chant amid her sobs an improvised but rhythmical lament over the body of her dead child. Rude as Caucasian poetry is, however, in construction, fierce and warlike as it generally is in spirit, one meets occasionally in Caucasian songs with the most delicate and graceful conceptions. Contrast, for example, "The Song of Khamzat" or "The Death-Song of the Chechense" with the following bit of Avarian poetry, which I have taken the liberty of calling:
GLAMOUR.
Come out of doors, O mother! and see what a wonder is here:
Up through the snows of the mountain the flowers of spring appear.
Come out on the roof, O mother! and see how along the ravine
The glacier-ice is covered with the springtime's leafy green!
There are no flowers, my daughter: 'tis only because thou art young
That blossoms from under the mountain-snows appear to thee to have sprung.
There is no grass on the glacier: the blades do not even start;
But thou art in love, and the grass and flowers are springing in thy heart.
I have space for only one more specimen of Caucasian heroic literature, a brief oration of Kazi Mullah, the friend and teacher of Shamyl and the founder of Caucasian Muridism. An imperfect translation of this speech will be found in Latham's Races of the Russian Empire. Copies of it in Arabic were widely circulated throughout Daghestan immediately after its delivery, and it probably contributed more than any other single thing to bring on the general insurrection of the East Caucasian mountaineers in 1832. In the spring of that year the inhabitants of a small aoul or mountain-village in Central Daghestan—I think Khunzakh—were assembled one evening in the walled courtyard of one of its houses under the minaret of the village mosque for the purpose of social enjoyment. Tradition relates that they were celebrating a wedding. A fire had been built in the middle of the courtyard, and around it picturesquely-dressed men and women were singing and dancing to the accompaniment of fifes, kettledrums and tambourines. Suddenly there appeared in the circular gallery of the minaret which overlooked the courtyard the figure of a tall, gray-bearded stranger, a mullah, whose green turban marked his lineal descent from the family of the Prophet. He looked down for a moment with stern displeasure into the fire-lighted courtyard, and then putting his hands to his lips chanted the Mohammedan call to prayers. The music and merrymaking instantly ceased, and the sweet weird chant rang out far and wide through the still evening air over the silent village, dying away at last in a long musical cry of La illaha il Allah! ("There is no God but God"). Amid profound silence Kazi Mullah—for the gray-bearded stranger was that renowned priest—stretched out his hand over the crowded courtyard and with slow stern gravity said:
"Upon all your merrymakings and feasts, upon all your marriages and rejoicings, upon yourselves, your children and your households, upon everything that you do, have and are, rests the awful curse of God! Heaven has marked you with the black seal of eternal damnation because you still grovel in sin and refuse to obey the voice and teachings of our holy Prophet. Your duty is to spread with the sword the light of our holy faith throughout the world; but what have you done? what are you doing? Miserable cowards! without faith and without religion! you pursue eagerly the pleasures of this life, but you despise the law of God and of his holy Prophet. Vain are your selfish prayers—vain is your daily attendance at the mosque. Heaven rejects your heartless sacrifices. The presence of the Russian infidel blocks up the way to the throne of God! Repent, pray, and arm yourselves for the war of the Most High. The hour draws near when I shall call you forth and consecrate you for the holy sacrifice of battle."