12 Secrets of the Caucasus Essad Bey

»In these days,« he was wont to say later on, »knights have sunk to the level of scribes. No one plunders hostile villages any more, or steals fat sheep, or seduces the beautiful girls of the enemy. Instead of all that, the sit indoors with their swords blunted, peeping into big books full of ugly black signs. A free knight has no business looking in big books.«

»When God, the Almighty«—so spake the eunuch—»created the earth, it was flat and level like the surface of the sea. Upon the level earth dwelt creatures: Men, Beasts, Spirits, Troubles, and Pestilences. Not until after the creation did the Merciful One bethink himself that he had conceived the earth too flat and level, and he therefore decided, in his bounty, to give every land some hills and little mountains. So he packed a mass of mountains into a sack and began to distribute them justly upon the earth. But the Evil One, the master of Troubles and of Pestilences, did not wish this gift to be granted to mankind. And as Allah hovered between the Caspian and the Black Sea, the Evil One slipped up beside his sack, slip open the cloth, and all the mountains fell down into the plain between the two seas. Thus began the Causcasus, the Land of Mountains. But the Lord of the World was very wroth. ‘Thou Evil One,’ he said, ‘thou corruptest my creation and maketh the first unrighteousness. Therefore, as a punishment, shall the mountainous land that is here created by forbidden thee. Men and Beast shall dwell in the mountains, but thou and thy servants, thy Troubles and thy Pestilences, shall not set foot upon the mountain land. Life among the crags wil be hard enough without thee.’

»So spake Allah, the Righteous One, and so it came to pass. Trouble and Sickness dwell in the plain amid the gardens where life is easy. But the heroes and the noblemen stay up in the mountains where there is no pestilence and no trouble.«

I was looked upon as a barbarian. White and gold may be worn in a town or in that sink of luxury, Besh-Tau, where nobody with good taste is ever about. But in the mountains it is prescribed that the clothes must suit the dagger.

»Assya—my son—they say that thou art ill. But I say unto thee that thou art not ill, thou are but hungry. I calmed thy hunger when thou didst lie in the cradle, and I will do it again now.« And suddenly she bared her body to the waist, leant over towards me, and presented one of her breasts to my mouth. Terrified, I glanced at the enuch. »Drink,« he said in Russian, »it is thus that people greet each other in the mountains.« So I set to bravely and drank for the last time from the breast of my nurse.

So the princes have a special language of their own, a language that is understood only by the prince and his peers. This is the famous hunting language. It was contrived by the inhabitants of the knights’ citadels, the princely palaces, and the robbers’ strongholds. The secret of it is strictly guarded, and no outsider has hitherto succeeded in becoming familiar with it though it is current throughout the whole of the mountains and among all the members of the caste. It is said to be the language of an extinct line of knights; but only within the last few decades has it come to be known about at all, so secretive were the princes.

»Heroes live here; and they are heroes because they are without knowledge.«

I do not know whether there are still men alive in the mountains who know the secret. At least they keep quiet about it and trust nobody. They know what happens if the fields are discovered. The freedom of the mountains is gone for ever, and freedom is more precious to them than diamonds.

The Caucasian sets no store by wealth; the number of his relatives is of far greater concern to him. No money can protect him from blood vengeance, nor can it avenge a murder. When the Caucasian needs money or jewels, he simply rides down the mountains and plunders the cowardly people of the valley.

In the mountains the girls sing: »If thou comest back, craven, from a raid, I will drive thee out.«

»If thou diest like a hero in the raid, then I am glad,« sing the mothers. And the heroes themselves sing: »What honour and understanding have we if our loved ones drive us out?«

»A book must have a scent,« a master of perfumery once said to me. »Old, finely written theses must exhale an enlivening aroma, so that the exhausted reader shall not fall asleep at his work, but give thanks to the memory of the Master.«

The first principle of married life in the mountains is that »the problem of the mother-in-law does not exist.«

But the execution of the lover is not the worst revenge taken for the misdeed. The following method (it is also used under other circumstances) is much more terrible in effect. The offended man has to attack his enemy in the night, tie him up, and pull his trousers off his legs. He then hangs the trousers on the door of his house where everybody can see them. This is considered the most dreadful insult which can be offered to a man. It is impossible to wipe out, even with blood. The man whose trousers have been stolen must either commit suicide or immediately leave his home country, never to return. And even abroad he must adopt another name, and keep away from his fellow-country-men. Usually he will choose suicide in preference to exile.

Greeks and Romans, Arabs and Persians, Turks and Russians, and finally the Bolsheviks have conquered the Caucasus and introduced their laws. The people submitted to everything, promised to obey all laws, and to meet all taxes. One thing only they insisted should be left to them—their customs. Every conqueror and ruler has had to give in to this request; otherwise the land rose up and the mountains flowed with blood, and the resultant quarrel often lasted for centuries. In the end the conqueror always said to them: »Live together as you please.«

Thus the customs and laws of the fathers remained unaltered, and among them the sacred obligation of the blood feud. Every conqueror tried to abolish it but always without success. The Caucasian can give up many things, but not revenge, even if it cost him his own head to attain it.

The law of kanly, the avenger’s law, is perhaps more complicated than many European laws and harder to understand than any other paragraph of human jurisprudence.

When the best of the race go down upon their knees, then it is time to renounce the customs of one’s fathers.

»The good qualities of the soul are formed in the mountains and only cleverness in the West.«

These ruins were formerly castles, are still to some extent castles even today, though they are falling apart with time; the inhabitants move to some other cliff, where they build a new citadel and forget all too soon the heroic deeds which haunt the old one. Men are quickly forgotten, and nowhere quicker than in the mountains where one hero follows another overnight.

I have met this remarkable chieftain, have stood face to face with him and looked into his little dark eyes, in which there is a peculiar and typically Caucasian smile. […] Stalin has a long curved nose, thick, coal-black hair, and a very low—a pathologically low—forehead.

The Abrek robbed and murdered and divided up the spoils among his poor countrymen; he bowed low before every prince and every priest and wrote grotesque letters to the Russian generals who could not catch him.

One of his letters said: »General, do you know why you can’t catch me? Because you are a wicked man! Your father certainly took bribes, and I suppose that you yourself were once the playboy of a priest. Your daughter also is a harlot and sleeps with a Frenchman. How should God help you in a fight against me?«

Nowhere in the world are so closely interwoven the threads of past and present, chivalry and Marxism, romance and political economy, secret presses and simple murder and robbery, as in the Caucasus; nowhere does the unbelievable so quickly become the actual, or the actual so quickly become an exuberant legend.

He did not deign to look at it, but pulled a bundle of bank-notes out of his pockets and threw it contemptuously to the doctor, remarking majestically as he did so: »Nothing but the streaming tears of your repentance can wash the filth of your insult from my countenance.«

The man who is insulted permanently calls himself an Abrek, which means »one who has taken the oath.« But there is an important difference between him and the other Abreks, the cheerful, simple, ordinary brigands. Chiefly, the difference is the famous oath of the man who is permanently offended, according to which he must order his whole life. This oath, which is spoken at midnight, after prayer and sacrifice, in the courtyard of the temple, runs as follows:

»I, the son of an honourable and free father, swear by the holy place which I honour, to remain for so many years an Abrek, a man eternally offended. All these years I will spill human blood and have mercy upon no man. I shall pursue human beings like wild animals. I swear to steal everything from my fellow-men which is dear to their hearts, to their consciences, and to their courage. I shall stab the baby at its mother’s breast, set the last shelter of the beggar in flames, and everywhere, where joy has reigned till now, there will I bring sorrow. If I do not fulfill this oath, if love or pity shall creep into my heart, then may I never see the grave of my fathers, may water never come to slake my thirst, nor bread to still my hunger, may my corpse lie upon the roadway, and a filthy animal befoul it.«

When a Caucasian wishes to honour anybody, he says to him: »You are a smith.«

Such duels do not happen any more now. Poets, they say, are grown soft. They no longer know how to hate, and they have no sufficient faith in their talent, nor do they dare to let their lives depend upon the success of their poems.

After these two courses, the Jew hands his guest mutton fat, which is considered a special delicacy. It is impossible to describe the taste of this dish; only a fellow-sufferer can conceive of the self-control that must be exercised by the unprepared guest at this juncture.

»We need nothing new; we have already had everything that a people can have; and anything we may not have had is superfluous.«

In two more generations, the last of the Nogai Tatars, that most un-Caucasian of races, will have disappeared from the earth. Yet still they say: »We need nothing more; we have achieved everything that a people can achieve. And now God will tolerate us no longer.«

»Whoso thinks of the consequences will never be brave.«

According to mountain law, a man may cut off his wife’s nose as a punishment when he catches her in flagrante delicto (which, be it here observed, is at least better than murdering her and being subsequently acquitted, as in Europe).

The famous song in which the sinister mountain knight expressed his soul ran as follows: »I, the robber Kholchvar, sing as I am about to die. Hear my song, ye people of the Avars, ye princes of the people, thou Khan of the land! Many people stand around me here; I see among them many women. These women are widows, for I have killed their husbands. Many children stand all around me and all of them are fatherless, for I have killed their fathers. In Khunsakh there are many virgins. They look at me through the lattices of their windows. I have kissed the breasts of each of these virgins, each of them I have dishonored, I, the robber Kholchvar. And even have I stolen the trousers of the wife of the Khan. And now I stand before the pyre, and now hear the last stanza of my song. Sweet is my voice. It lureth away children thus—!« At that, the robber bent down and seized with both hands the two sons of the Khan who were listening to the song and jumped with them into the flaming pyre. The last stanza resounded from the flames: »Be silent, ye children of a whore, I, too, am burning with you. Hearken, ye Avars, thou Khan, hearken! Go tell it to my mother, how I died and how in death I took revenge, I, the robber Kholchvar.«

I heard many wonderful stories in the Caucasus about robbers, soldiers of liberty, buried treasures, and fair ladies. Perhaps a great many of them were fables. But nevertheless they are just as true as anything that can be proven by inscriptions, old manuscripts, or yellowing archives and registers. To learn to know the Caucasus one need not go a-burrowing among old parchments and doubtful museum pieces.

And again it became evident that nothing in the Caucasus had changed. The years of revolution and the years of Soviet power have had but little influence on the Caucasian. Blood feud flourishes there as much as ever; the soldier of liberty, the Abrek, still rides upon the mountain trails; and the hill folk live as before, unexplored, with their incomprehensible languages, and their age-old customs and legends, which have increased abundantly since the revolution. Apparently nothing can change the Caucasian; he clings stubbornly to his fathers’ ways of living; and there is no more superficial thing in the world than the much-vaunted Europeanization of the towns and villages of the hills. The mountain folk are not Europeans, and they are not Asiatic; they are Caucasian—that is to say, a special race of men that will endure.