Life of Schamyl. J. Milton Mackie

or a deer shot on the road, and cooked either by being roasted before the fire, or laid, cut in slices, on live embers. Whatever chance game the luck of the day may furnish for the supper, it will be sure to be eaten with a relish that will need no sauce; though even with nothing more than his unleavened bread and water the Circassian is perfectly contented, and adds thanks therefor in his prayers.

      Supper finished, ablutions performed, and prayers said, the hunters unroll their blankets, placing one on the ground and the other over them, with their feet turned towards the fire blazing with large logs of wood; and so under the protection of the open heavens and the stars, which are the thousand watchful eyes of Allah, his simple children sleep.

      In entering upon the region of the higher mountains the valleys grow narrower, showing only here and there a mere line of green, or oftener, the silver thread of torrents rushing headlong over the rocks. Strong was the contrast when in an opening between the mountains the hunter looked down upon the shepherd's cottage, with its shade of nut-bearing trees and its fold of white fleeces, or upon a patch of cultivated ground high among the rocks to which the husbandman climbs for the sake of a few handfuls of grain, or the pasture of his cow or goat; and when, on the other hand, he beheld around him, as was often the case, only the mountain tops sparsely covered with dwarfed oaks and planetrees, the rocks frequently naked save here and there the covering of moss, the immense masses broken up into clefts and chasms, piled on top of each other in forms the most shapeless and grotesque, an utter waste, and the more desolate from some wild bird of the mountains which occasionally flapped its wings overhead, or the wild goat which startled sprang away among the distant rocks.

      Yet there are localities still higher up where from favorable exposure the mountaineer pushes an adventurous plough, tilling his slope with rifle slung at his back, and gathering his harvest full three months later than in the plains below. Here, too, blooms the Caucasian rose or rhododendron, and the azalia-pontica, from the blossoms of which is made the honey of that intoxicating quality mentioned by Strabo, and which, when mixed in small quantity with the ordinary mead, forms a beverage as potent as the alcoholic liquors of the north.

      On reaching the snow-line of the Kasbek, at farthest, the progress of the hunters would be arrested. On their way hither they would have occasionally brought down a fallow deer or a fat bear, besides pheasants and the wild hens of the mountains, hares, and large grey squirrels. They might even have had a shot or two at a wild sheep or buffalo, which as well as horses sometimes roam untamed the mountains; and from time to time their rifles must have been tempted also by the porcupine crossing their path, by the fox surprised far from his hole, by the wild-cat driven into a tree, and even by the wolf prowling around their steps towards nightfall.

      Here, with the never-melting snows not far overhead, they would find small stone houses erected expressly for the use of the chamois-hunter. For along these elevated crags runs and bounds the nimble rupicapra; in certain favorite tracts is occasionally met the ibex, roaming solitary over his scanty pastures; and on the very highest rocks, where in winter they lie with faces to the wind, insensible to the most intense cold, are seen herds of still another species of the wild goat resembling in shape the tamed one, but larger, having long beautiful horns, and flesh with the dainty flavor of venison.

XII.

       Table of Contents

      IN THE WHITE MOUNTAINS.

      But proud as is the returning hunter of the beautiful chamois horns hung upon his saddle-bow, it could scarcely be otherwise than that the soul of one so smitten with the love of natural scenery as was Schamyl, should here be more occupied with contemplating the grandeur of the mountain tops than in chasing the timid, graceful animals which thereupon find a home. If in the course of his ascent he had kept his eyes pretty steadily fixed upon the magnificent summits far off white with snows, but nearer blue with the ice which has led the Tartars to give to them the name of Ialbus or ice-mane; if lower down he had gazed with admiration at the oaks which for two centuries had grasped with their roots and overspread with their branches the rocks in situations to which upon the Alps and the Pyrenees only climbs the pine; and if higher up he had not passed by unnoticed even the lowly pink and rose of the mountains, blooming along the snow-line, but even there sought out by the bee and the butterfly of Apollo; how would he be overwhelmed with the sublimity of the scene on finding himself in the dread company of Kasbek and the hundred other peaks which are his vassals! Standing on the steps of the throne of this, like Elbrus, dsching padischah, or king of spirits, he would gaze around upon a host of cones and needles glittering in the sunlight, while far below lay the Black or wooded mountains, looking for the most part with the same face of precipices upon the remoter steppes as do the White mountains on themselves. Indeed there is wanting only the lakes of the Bernese Alps, glaciers as magnificent as those of Chamouni, and cascades like the Staubbach and the fall of the Aar to make this Caucasian range the most beautiful, as it probably is the most sublime, on the face of the earth.

      Still the Caucasus boasts of more majestic woods and a more luxuriant flora than the Alps; and when to its scenery is added the coloring lent it by the rising and the setting sun, there can be no higher beauty in nature anywhere. Especially during the summer months travellers have noted a remarkable purity of atmosphere in these mountains, and represent them as being full of light a considerable time before the appearing of the sun on the horizon; while in autumn there is sufficient vapor to furnish the landscape with that drapery of blue mist and variously tinted clouds, so characteristic of the summer views of the Alps. In this long interval, between the break of day and the complete sunrise, it seems to the dullest observer as if nature were standing wrapt in adoration of the great Creator. Clad in snows and ice the thousand peaks are like white-robed priests ministering in a temple not made with hands; and when the loftiest tops are tipped with the purple of the coming day, it is as it were the incense-burning censers which they swing high in heaven. Then the lower mountains, too, receive an additional beauty when the level rays light up with a still brighter red the mighty masses of porphyry, and the dark granite glows with a vermilion not its own. Every variety and form of rock is transfigured by the new-born light from heaven. The white chalkstone glitters from afar; the light grey feldspar assumes a warm flesh tint; the limestone becomes straw color; the crystals of hornblende flash like fire-flies; and the veins of white quartz, running with their nodules of serpentine and chlorite through the dark clay-slate, gleam as do chain lightnings through the clouds.

      At sight of the gathering tempest the superstitious huntsman is not entirely exempt from terror. Some of the calcareous mountains, like the Beschtau, for example, being a perfect barometer, he knows, when their top becomes covered with clouds as with a hat, and their entire form is gradually enveloped in a mantle of mists, that there will be foul weather. Even the degree of wind and rain may be calculated with a considerable degree of certainty from the extent and different tints of the vapors; and if the indications are exceedingly threatening the hunter immediately erects his tent, if he have one, as on the ocean the sailor furls his canvas; or, lacking this protection, he seeks for the shelter of some projecting rock, or the entrance of a cavern. There when the sun is shrouded in clouds, and the blackness almost of night falls like a pall over the mountains, when the wind howls around the summits, and the thunder with its infinity of reverberations rattles, and bounds from crag to crag throughout the chain, seeming to make the very rocks tremble and totter, then affrighted he hears in the winds the flapping of the wings of that monstrous bird of the mountains whose age is a thousand years; in the lightnings which play over the abyss he sees the glaring eyes and waving mane of the wild white horse who, issuing from his stall under the glaciers, races with the storm; and in the thunders hears the resounding wheels of the chariot of Elijah kept, say some of the ancient Christian traditions, in the Redeemer's palace on the top of Kasbek.