CHAPTER XXI
VOICES OF THE VALLEY
In the calm air of the Sunday morning with the brook going gently by, I came to the entrance of the hoary ruins wherein I had first seen Dariel. A chapel with lines of grey flint only, to show where once the sacred walls had risen, and nothing but the soft sky for roof, and mortar and moss for pavement. Stepan, as big as a pulpit, but more mute, stood close by expecting me, and led me along a ferny path, and dusted a stone to sit upon, with a noble quietude. But when I asked him – "What am I to do?" he took it for our national salutation, and answered "like a house afire, sir." So I gave it up, and resolved to act according to the light of nature, and the behaviour of the others when they arrived. Only if there came a great procession of images, as I expected, nothing should make me depart from the proper demeanour of a Briton.
However I was not called upon to assert the great Reformation. A more simple, quiet, and impressive service I never witnessed anywhere; and although there was no roof overhead, and little enclosure on either side, the view of the sky, and the passing of the wind, and the sense of antiquity around us were in harmony, as it seemed to me, with the conditions of humility, and mortality, and hopefulness. The strictest Puritan could have found fault with little except the red crosses worn by all the congregation, and a few triangles and wreaths of white flowers. And the man who can find any fault with these must consider himself too faultless to worship any other being.
First came the women, only seven or eight in number, veiled not very heavily, and cloaked in cheerful raiment. And the last of these was Dariel, looking as if she had never dreamed of anything uncelestial, while the loveliness of her figure gleamed through the folds of her flowing mantle; even as the flexure and the texture of an agate glisten through the cloudy pretext of their coat to hide them. "Who shall understand these things?" thought I, "there is no one on earth fit to approach her; yet the Lord cannot have meant her to be always by herself." And then I thought of Hafer – Prince indeed! Prince of darkness, and nothing else – and I looked about, with anything but religious peace inside me. However I could perceive no sign of any wickedness high or low; and every heart except my own sang a grateful and worshipful tune to the Lord.
Even to me it was a quiet and devout proceeding, when Imar (not as one who preaches to a crowd of animals below him, but like a man speaking to and on behalf of men – not abject, though beneath a cloud) began the simple offering of our love, and trust, and loyalty. To me it was grander than it might have been to those who could criticise it; for I could not object to anything, because I did not comprehend a word. Nevertheless it did me good, inasmuch as it did the others good; and if a man lives in himself alone, he will not find much good there, I fear. And when they began their final hymn of high thanksgiving, and hopeful trust that our Maker will not be as hard upon us as we are upon one another, the sound of great rejoicing – which our Christians never indulge in – filled the valley, and went up the heights, such as we are bidden to gaze at, while we stick to the dismal hollows. I knew that I was only of a dull prosaic order, but felt for the moment above myself, with the other fellows lifting me.
However absurd it may appear to those who are always at one level of self-made dignity and – something else – true it is we all were moved, as no formality can stir us. Stepan had a mighty voice, and more than his throat was in it; then Dariel cast by her veil, and her beautiful lips were trembling, like a wild-rose quivering with petals half-open over some melodious stream. I thought of the time when I had first beheld her, and my love was not of this earth alone.
When all were gone, and I was thinking still what prigs we are, and cowards too, who suppose that there is one way only of getting near our Father, that humble man who had been our priest came up to me, and spoke sadly. I saw that he was down at heart, and full of doubt about himself, and wanting higher comfort than a man like me could give him. But I could not guess, until he told his melancholy story, why he should be thus downcast, after doing his utmost for the benefit of others. I had not known what the service meant, but saw that it had been simple, solemn, and free from all rant and false excitement; and this I ventured to express.
"Come in, my friend, and have some refreshment. On Sundays all the men dine together," he said as he led me inside the door, "and we will have something with them. I fear that you found it difficult to keep from laughing at the sight of such an astonishing set of hats, and scarcely any two alike. We copied them first, I sometimes think, from our highest and most fantastic peaks; but art has outdone nature. In truth they are a motley lot, but there is not a false heart among them."
I had seen nearly all of them before, on the day of the police invasion, but not as now in their best apparel, a strange and interesting sight. Some of them had wondrous coats, frogged and braided, and painted and patched, and ribboned and laced, and leathered, and I know not what, with coins, and baubles, and charms, and stars, and every kind of dangle; and two of them wore Russian uniforms far advanced in years, and captured perhaps in the days of Shamyl. But their faces, though covered with beards and freckles, could not be called savage or ignoble; and though one or two bore a swarthy aspect, some were as fair as Englishmen. I could well believe that there might be truth in the tradition of their tribe, that they were a separate race, distinct among the myriad mountain strains, having the hot oriental blood refreshed and strengthened from the Western founts. They regarded their Chief with patriarchal loyalty and deference, but no servility or cringing; it was his pleasant duty to maintain them, and theirs to work for him, to a rational extent. Whatever they had was his, so far as nature allows such partnership; while his property enjoyed the privilege of ministering to their welfare.
"They have done well," said the Chief to me, while I was revolving these things slowly; and hoping that his daughter might appear at last to grace the feast; "they will go and wander in their gardens now, and have the pleasure of sitting in their native form."
"Which is something like that of a hare," I replied, without calling to mind that it might seem rude; but he smiled, for he never took offence unless it were intended, which is a most sagacious rule. And he proceeded with his inference.
"The fact that they are coming without much pain to the use of chairs and benches, when commended to them by a good dinner, tends to prove that they are of a high and naturally docile race. But come to my room, and have a glass of Kahiti; and then we will go forth into the wood, and you shall know all that has come to pass in the life of a man not so very old yet, but with all his best years behind him."
He smiled, and I looked at him still in his strength, still comely and sweet of temper, a man with almost every gift of nature, but not endowed with happiness. And his smile was not that of a jubilant heart, which has tried and can trust its own buoyancy; but rather of the calm mind which flows in, to level all the tumult, and to cover all the ruin. I thought to myself that I must come to that, if Dariel went on, as she seemed to do, and kept out of sight without a word to me.
But after a bottle of the Chief's light wine – a dozen of which would not have turned a British hair – I had the presence of mind to fill my pipe and pouch with some very fair tobacco of the mountains, and to follow him over a clever little bridge of his own construction into the heart of the grey old wood. There we sat upon a mossy log, and he poured out his story, while the sunshine came in slants sometimes, and I wished there had been more of it.
I cannot repeat Sûr Imar's tale with any of his self-commanding strength, much less convey the light and shade of a voice alive with memory of whatever the soul has suffered. However, to the best of my belief, the import of his words is here. Feebly, but never falsely, have I set down his remembrances. Only his foreign turns of language have escaped my memory; and he must tell what he has to tell like an ordinary Englishman. Which means without long words, whenever short ones serve the turn as well.
CHAPTER XXII
IMAR'S TALE – WAR
"That which I have always admired in your nation, and that which has made you what you are, under the guidance of the Lord, is your natural gift of self-command. The race to which I belong has always been very scant of that great quality; and this fault has been from age to age the cause of misery and conflict. Not that we are by any means so turbulent and vindictive as other tribes around us; for we almost alone are guided, when in our proper state of mind, by any sense of Christianity; most of the others who call themselves of that creed, such as the Ossets, Imeritians, and barbarous Suans, have made a strange jumble of the true faith with Mohammedanism, paganism, and even stark idolatry. But the Lesghians, with whom we have most to do, and who claim us as of their affinity, still are of Islam, and mainly of that bigoted and aggressive form of it which is known as Muridism. Even so, they are nobler, braver, more patriotic, and loyal to their chiefs, as well as of finer presence, and greater activity and industry than most of their neighbours on the west and south, who suppose themselves to be Christians.
"My father, Sûr Dadian, as hereditary Chief of the Kheusurs – a tribe now dwindled from its former strength – commanded for many years their division in the army of the gallant Shamyl. Our people did not share of course that fury of Islam, and blaze of the crescent, which scorched the Russians by the thousand out of the dark ravines of Daghestan. Nevertheless we stood up for ourselves, with the muzzle of a gun at every elbow of the rocks; and if all the sons of Islam had been as faithful to their great Imaum, as the Cross was, the Russian flag would never have waved over Guinib, in Shamyl's lifetime.
"The Russian plan was to press us hard, throughout the summer and autumnal months, with ten men perhaps to every one of ours; to encourage us most benevolently to sow our land and tend it, and then to rejoice and renew their strength with the pithy marrow of our corn, and the juicy fibre of our flocks and herds. A man loves his country on the very same principle on which he loves his mother; but if he can never taste what she is like, he might just as well have a step-mother. Neither was this the only loss of satisfaction year by year. Our men, as I have heard them tell, when I was old enough to join them, felt even worse than their own privations the rich gain of the enemy. To sit on a rock, just out of shot – as many a dauntless Avar told me – with glacier water for his drink, and nothing but mast on his tattered lap, and to see a hundred fat round fellows, who had come into his land quite lean, laughing and joking at his own door, with the milk of his best cow at their lips, and the kids of his flock coming up to them in sniffs from the fires where they were roasting, this he assured me – and I could quite believe him – turned his empty digestion into bile, and the love of his native land into a hollow ache. And this very feeling, in a higher form, cost my dear father his valiant life, and left me and my sister orphans.
"You may have heard of the defeat and slaughter of an entire Russian column, under the great Prince Dorougoff, which our gallant mountain forces, with my father second in command, accomplished most effectually. Everybody knows what glory and renown accrued to the stout Imaum through this; but all of our men who were present declared that my father deserved the main credit. The Emperor of Russia had grown impatient, and sent impetuous orders that his army should advance at once into the heart of the defiles, and crush the rebellion – as he dared to call it, though we never had been his subjects – at one mighty blow, and for ever. The Commander replied that he would march His Majesty's army in, but never would march it out again. And according to that answer, so it was. Our men became tired of slaughter, although they had many a long year of suffering to avenge.
"As might have been expected, the mountaineers grew careless after this great victory, and left many of their passes open; for the stubborn foe had recoiled, and appeared unable to do anything more until the following season. My father went home to see to his affairs, and to secure a new supply of rifles, for he had brought from Koorbashi a score of those skilled workmen of Genoese descent, who for accuracy and finish can hold their own with the best gunmakers in the world. All Shamyl's best troops were armed with weapons procured from these admirable artisans, and the clumsy muskets of the Russian force were quite unfit to cope with them. Stepan has one of those Koorbashi rifles, which you would find it hard to match in London, either for beauty of design or for excellence in shooting. But alas they were all muzzle-loaders, or the Caucasus might have been Caucasian still.
"Karthlos Tower, where our family had dwelled for many generations, takes its name from that same descendant of Noah who founded Mischel; and standing on a mountain plateau, with chasms abrupt and vertical cleaving the land to immeasurable depths, it is safe against all adverse powers, except treachery and famine. Among the labyrinth of ravines no stranger could ever find his road; and if chance at last brought him to the winding access, discretion would hurry him shuddering away. For many a black muzzle would look down upon him, and if he escaped all those, a score of yellow ones would confront him at the final crest, and of tenfold size, – brass artillery from Koorbashi.
"It was growing dark in those cloven depths, though the sun was still hovering upon the upper world, when my father rode round the last sharp jag at the foot of the ascent to Karthlos. The survivors of his war-dwindled force were only a few yards behind him, lounging on their tired horses, and scarcely caring to keep up the burden of their homeward song. Then when their leader was round the point, they heard the roar of a heavy gun, swinging like a wing-flap from wall to wall, and departing in the distance, like an echo climbing stairs. They spurred to know what it could mean, and they found Sûr Dadian dead on the neck of his horse.
"I had not seen my father more than half a dozen times, so far as childish memory goes; but he was always kind and loving, and very gentle with us. We had lost our mother before we knew her; and Marva and myself, twin children, had been sent from home, we could not tell when, to be educated at Tiflis. There our father had some old friends, and being so seldom at home, by reason of this perpetual war, he had done the best he could for us. I was placed in the German town on the left bank of the Kur, and under the care of a learned man, famous even in the "City of many tongues" for his knowledge of all useful languages. He had several English pupils, and admiring Shakespeare as the Germans do, he made us almost as familiar with English as if we were born to it. But Marva, my sister, had her education in the school of a French convent on the other side of the river. Twins as we were, and pining long at this unnatural severance, the force of events, and the power of education, drove us further and further apart, until the early divergencies of tastes and dispositions became so hardened and widened that our mutual love was vanishing.
"The murder of my father – for it could be nothing else – occurred in the autumn of 1852; but it was not known in Tiflis until three months later, for the city had long been in Russian hands, and Shamyl's victorious troops allowed very little communication. Even when known, it was kept from me, for some time longer, as I have reason to believe, by order of the College authorities. At last I knew it by a letter from Shamyl himself, or written by his orders – for he dispensed very largely with literature – which it took me a long time to make out, for I had almost forgotten the Avar tongue. How he smuggled it to me, I know not; but at last I understood it to this effect.
"'Young Imar, the son of Dadian. The Russians have slain thy father in cold blood. Thou art now the Chief of the Kheusurs. Thou art not of Islam; but if thou hast any blood in thy body, come without delay, and have thy just revenge upon the accursed heathen. Shamyl, the Imaum.'
"What youth of spirit and health and strength could hesitate for an hour? I had many Russian friends at Tiflis, and all of the higher rank made light of the barbarian tumult, as they called it, among the distant mountains. They begged me at least to wait until the truth of the Muridist outlaw's words could be properly established; for they said that he could outlie a Greek, or even an Armenian. But I broke from them all, bade farewell to Marva, and in shorter time than space required, presented myself to Shamyl.
"That Hannibal of the East was now at the acme of his fame and power. Though not of great stature, or winning aspect, or even exemplary cleanliness, he possessed and exercised that gift of forcing the wills of others into the channel of his own, which makes a man's course historical. He had piercing eyes, deeply set and overhung, and a swarthy complexion, and strong harsh features, enlivened sometimes with a smile conveying a boyish and rudimental sense of humour. But let any one rouse his temper, and the Demon of the Mountains, who haunts the crags of Kazbek, could not rave more furiously. It was this, and not cold inhumanity – as strangers to our race imagined – which drove him into those brutal acts which disgraced the name of Avar. Whether he believed in his Divine Mission to restore the glory of Islam, and extirpate the infidel, or whether he laughed in his sleeve at that most useful delusion, I never could decide. As a Christian, and a well educated youth, I thoroughly disdained such stuff; but while contemning the Muridist and the Imaum, I fell more than behoved me perhaps under the influence of the patriot. For I was but eighteen years of age, and as yet quite a child among men of action, though foremost of the students in philology at Tiflis, and even in bodily strength and activity equal to the best of them.
"My presence at first was of service to the cause, only as securing the assistance of my tribe, who had no share in Islam, and would have deserted very promptly without my presence among them. But before long I proved myself a valuable recruit, and was advanced to a command among the scouts; upon whom in that war of surprises and sudden encounters much depended. Although I hated and scorned the religion of our Chief, I shared his patriotism, and admired his valour and genius, while often wondering at the forbearance he showed to an 'unbeliever.' This I owed to his sense of honour, as I learned long afterwards, inasmuch as he had promised my father, his old companion in arms, that he would never make any attempt to convert me, if I were allowed to join him. Then suddenly he fell in my esteem, for I found out that he had lied to me.
"So zealous had I been in military matters, and so eager to qualify myself for command, that for two years I never went home to Karthlos Tower, the proper abode of our race. I never cared for form and fuss, and the earthly division of God's children into two creations – the high-born and the low-born half – for perhaps there are more who knew their Father in humility, than in proud estate.
"In my youth I never thought of such things, to which convention drives us, but simply divided the men around me into hearties who would fight, and poltroons who ran away; and of the latter there were but few. The Steward at the Tower had supplied me with all that I wanted in those rugged times; and in the hot vein of my patriotism, a crust and an icicle seemed enough for a soldier to subsist upon. But now I was compelled to return to Karthlos by a strange thing which had come to pass, while I was intent upon war alone.
"Marva, twin-sister of mine, and in childhood dearer than my little self to me, had defied all authority; and when that did not avail, had outwitted it, and vanished from the Convent-school at Tiflis. And my first news of it was a strong demand for her portion of the patrimony, from the man who had run away with her. This was the Chief of an Osset tribe, who had never joined in the war, but waited for the final issue; in which even we who kept it up could have little confidence, unless the great Powers in the West, now at enmity with Russia, would send us speedy and effectual help. And I knew that this Osset Chief had been a hereditary foe to my father.
"His name was Rakhan, which is, I believe, of Tartar origin; and he showed signs in character and in features too of kinship to that widespread race. But his father had been of pure Ossetian blood, and now he was acknowledged Chief of a certain wild, and semi-Christian tribe. We had never had much to do with them, although their villages lay near us on the West; for the Russians kept a fortified post between us, where their main road crosses the mountain-chain, and we scarcely regarded them as brother Christians, though that did not prevent us from having plenty of private feuds with them. And now this man of an inferior race, and a poor one too – for they throve principally upon goats – had dared to make up to my twin-sister, and marry her, and demand her heritage!
"And this was not the worst of it, for as soon as I entered Karthlos, my good Steward, Kobaduk, a very faithful servant, told me that beyond any doubt Rakhan, the Osset, had compassed and probably with his own hand committed the murder of my father, Sûr Dadian. I replied that the Imaum himself had assured me that the Russians were guilty of that crime, and this had impelled me to quit all friends and hurry without going home to Bodlith. But he spat on the ground, as our peasants do, when they hear of a black deception, and soon proved to me that the Czar's troops were guiltless; and not only so, but that Shamyl the Tartar – as he was frequently called in contempt – knew as well as Kobaduk did, that there was not a Russian within miles of Karthlos, when that cowardly shot was fired. Moreover, the foremost of my father's men who had spurred along the defile, made oath that he saw a white globe whirl away where the crags broke apart in the distance, and he put his jaded horse to the utmost speed, all in vain among darkness and precipices. Now every one knows that no Russian soldier, and the Ossets alone in our part of the range can be found with that hideous head-gear flapping, a sheep-skin puffed out into a ball at the top, like a great white onion at the end of a stick. And there was other evidence as well as this.
"My twin-sister, my only near of kin, for my father had no other children – was I likely, although she had acted thus, to rob her of a single copek? Nay, rather would not every one of mine be at her service? At the same time, could any son endure that his good father should be robbed not only of life but also of a third part of his property by a scoundrel of inferior race, who had stolen his daughter for that very end. Thereupon I was compelled to believe – for charity is by St. Paul described as the greatest of Christian virtues, but he does not appear (though a native of Cilicia) to have travelled in the Caucasus, as Peter did, otherwise never could he have retained enough of that virtue to describe it – young as I was, the conviction grew upon me that Prince Rakhan, the Osset, had murdered my father, Sûr Dadian, because he had refused him his daughter Marva. Instead of answering the letter therefore in which he demanded his portion, I set forth with a few troopers well armed to pay him a visit in his stronghold at Zacca, near the fountains of the Ardon river.
"Some parts of our own land are desolate enough, but this country where the Ossets lived had scarcely a tree to make the world look living; and having had no war in their neglected places to civilize them with the passage of guns, they seemed to be quite outside all knowledge. Yet to my surprise, they looked down upon our race, which we for generations had been wont to do to them; and with better reason, as all others will admit. We rode very fine Khabarda steeds, which are the best of all the Caucasus, but we were obliged to leave them in the bed of a little snow-river at last, and appear at the entrance on foot, as if we expected to be shot at.
"Nobody shot at us, chiefly perhaps because few of them had learned the way to shoot; but there was not one of them who required any lessons in the art of staring. And to think that such people looked down upon us! All their houses had hideous towers, as if their lives were spent in looking out from the tops; and my heart went low, as I thought of my lively and lovely sister Marva, who had been brought up like a French girl almost, extinguished and deadened among such clods. And I had not even the chance of learning how she liked the lot she had cast for herself. Perhaps she may have seen me from some tower – for they have narrow loops instead of windows – but she never showed her face to me, nor sent me any message.
"We shouted, and made noise enough to fling all the rocky echoes into a Babel of dispute with one another, and if we could have found the butt end of a tree, we would have made a rush for it and rammed the heavy gate. At last a surly fellow put his head out at a loophole, and rubbed his eyes as if we had broken his repose. I did not understand their language then, though I came to know it afterwards; but some of my men made out this delivery – 'Sons of the Evil One, ye shall not rob us. The noble Prince Rakhan is far off; but we will fight until he returns. Ye will be slain by thundering guns, unless ye cease this uproar.'
"We could not believe that Osset robber; for the people of the village had told us that the Chief and his bride were both at home; but I tore a leaf out of my order-book, and wrote a letter upon it, and handed it up on the point of a lance. It contained no insolence, though that was rumoured afterwards, but only these words which a man of honesty would have met according to their intention. 'Sûr Imar to Prince Rakhan. If you will come to Karthlos, bringing with you the relics of St. Anthony, and upon them swear that you have had no hand in the death of my dear father, I will deliver to you all the portion of my sister Marva, and add thereto my own present to her, and acknowledge you as a brother.'
"This I signed with some hope of better feeling; for I knew that they had in this savage place no small piece of St. Anthony, and having three men who could make a cross, I secured all three as witnesses; and then we marched away from this inhospitable desert. But the worst of the business was not over yet, for when we returned to the spot where we had tethered our horses very carefully, not one of them was there except my own, and he was loose, but ran to me. Him alone those Ossets had not stolen, because he could bite as well as kick, and would let none but his master handle him. We ran back to the village, but there was not a soul there, except a few children yelling. All these we put into one hut far apart, and then set fire to all the rest. But being of stone they burned very unkindly, and having no time to make a good job of it, we shook the Ossetian dust from our feet, and made off in hope as well as fear of having all the mad savages after us.
"How, among a people thus divided, could there be any chance of solid resistance to a mighty nation like Russia, acting in unity, and able to replace every man killed with a dozen just as good? There was not a tribe among us that would join its neighbour, for any other purpose than the plunder of a third; and when this was carried off, the victorious pair were sure to have another fight about the booty, before they were half-way home again. A quarrel was now set up between my people and those of Prince Rakhan, which would probably last for generations; not so much about my father's murder – for that was a matter of suspicion only, and chiefly concerned his next of kin – but about the theft of those well-bred horses, and the firing of that worthless village. And when I received a letter of insult in the Georgian language, from the man who had so injured me, the only thing that surprised me was his ability to write it. For though he spent much of his time at Tiflis, whenever he could scrape up coin enough, it was not for the purpose of improving his mind, even if he had any to embellish. That problem however was speedily solved; for the writing was my sister's.
"'Imar, son of Dadian. Twice hast thou wronged me, thy brother in the Lord. Thou hast robbed me of my portion of thy father's goods, and thou hast set fire to my wealthiest village, destroying men, women, and children. Though thou art now a great man of battle, and strong among the strongest, so that thy name is as that of Minghi Tau, yet shall that mighty head be fetched down, and those strong hands shall feed the dogs of Kektris. The only hope left thee of escaping this destruction is if thou sendest to the glacier of Gumaran, before the snows fill up the valley again, gold and cattle, and household goods, according to the number herein set down, which is far less than thou owest me, and will not make peace between us for the village thou hast destroyed. But this if thou doest, I will pray for thy repentance, and thy sister whom thou hast robbed will permit thee to look upon her face again. Rakhan, Prince of the noble Ossets.'