"Kill, and thou shalt be killed, and he shall be killed who killeth thee."-Spanish Proverb.

W

HEN Captain Cherkassof told me. in Khorochoi that the state of society in Daghestan was that of the tenth century, I took his statement with some grains of allowance. "No doubt," I said to myself, "the people of the eastern Caucasus are uncivilized; but they can hardly be nine hundred years behind the age in which they live." My skepticism was shaken a little by the stories that Akhmet told me of his early life, but I did not become fully convinced that the Daghestan mountaineers were still in the medieval stage of social development until I encountered the armed man in the burial shroud and had an opportunity to see the spirit of the tenth century in action. Three or four days after Akhmet and I crossed the divide of the Andiski Khrebet, we stopped for the night in the aoul of Inkheli, the most extraordinary mountain village that I had yet seen. It was situated on a high, steep bluff overlooking the gorge of the Andiski Koisu, and seemed, as we climbed toward it from the bed of the stream, to consist of a mass of broken-stone dwellings which had been built solidly together, and which extended up the sloping mountain-side for a distance of two or three hundred yards. The terraces, made one above another by the successive tiers of flat roofs, were connected here and there by ladders, as in a New Mexican pueblo; but there were no streets or passages between the houses, and the only way, it seemed to me, that a man could enter his own dwelling was by climbing ladders, crossing roofs, and descending into his attic through a scuttle. I soon discovered, however, that this great communal beehive might be entered from below as well as from above. Half-way up the mountain-side, on the edge of the settlement, Akhmet rode into the mouth of a dark, narrow tunnel, and conducted me into a labyrinth of subterranean passages whose sides were the foundation walls of the superimposed buildings. Opening off from these passages, here and there, were black caverns, which were used, Akhmet said, as stables,

and at intervals of ten or fifteen yards we. passed ladders, or flights of narrow steps, which gave access to the houses above.

"How did people ever come to build a village with underground streets?" I inquired of Akhmet, as we rode through these filthy and noisome corridors.

"There wasn't much room," he explained, "between the precipice behind and the river in front, and they wanted all of it for houses." "But why put a village in a place where there wasn't room enough for streets?"

Because it was an easy place to defend," he replied. "Before the Russians came we were all the time fighting among ourselves, one clan against another, and it wasn't safe to build on low, open ground. We had our farms and pastures there, but we brought our horses and cattle into the village every night, and, as you may have noticed, we still stack our hay on the roofs of our houses."

I had noticed it, but did not know the reason for it.

"This village is built in a solid mass," he continued," and the streets are underground; but it would be a hard place to storm in a fight. A thousand men couldn't take it in a month."

About an eighth of a mile from the entrance to these village catacombs, with whose windings Akhmet seemed to be perfectly familiar, we dismounted, turned our horses into a cave-like stable, and climbed a dirty ladder into the house of a mountaineer whom my guide and interpreter knew. The guest chamber, to which we were at once conducted, was a fairly spacious room, with floor, walls, and ceiling of beaten clay mixed with chopped straw. Its windows were small unglazed port-holes,1 which overlooked the flat roof of the next house below, and there was a door which opened upon the roof of another dwelling, so that the room might be entered either by climbing a ladder from the underground street or by crossing an

The Daghestan mountaineers, at the time of my visit, had no glass, and used no substitute for glass. In pleasant weather their small square windows were left open, and when it stormed they were closed with tight plank shutters. Their rooms were warmed by open fireplaces in which, owing to the scarcity of wood, they burned cakes of dried cow-dung.

The

acre or more of flat village house-tops. guest chamber contained no furniture except a broad, low, rug-covered divan; but in one corner there was a rectangular pile of bedding over which had been thrown a square of homespun woolen cloth. A silver-mounted flintlock pistol and a nearly straight saber hung on a peg driven into one of the wooden posts that supported the ceiling, and nailed against the back of the door that communicated with the other part of the house I noticed what seemed to be the bones and dry shriveled remains of a man's severed hand -doubtless the ghastly trophy of some battle or blood feud.

As soon as it became noised about the village that Akhmet Avarski had arrived, with an unknown traveler from a strange land across a mighty ocean of which nobody had ever heard, our room rapidly filled with · armed men in Caucasian dress, who came to press thumbs with Akhmet1 and to stare at me. They were all Avars, of the north European type, and if they had been divested of their weapons and clothed in civilized dress they might have been taken in Berlin or St. Petersburg for Scandinavians or Great Russians from the province of Novgorod. Nothing would have distinguished them from north Europeans except, perhaps, their fierce, hawklike eyes and the piercing intensity of their gaze. They all talked loudly, and discussed freely with Akhmet my appearance and my dress; but they did not laugh at me nor permit themselves to be in any way discourteous or offensive.

Suddenly, while I was watching and appraising them with an interest at least equal to their own, the loud talking ceased, and all eyes were turned toward the open door, where stood a tall, stern-faced man, wrapped from head to foot in a white cotton sheet. He seemed to be looking for some one, and presently, discovering the man of whom he was in search, he stepped into the room and began to talk in a vehement and excited way to a mountaineer who happened to be standing near the divan on which Akhme: and I sat. Everybody crowded toward us, as if the matter involved was one of great interest, and after three or four minutes of hot debate between the principals the man who had been standing near us went out.

"What has happened?" I asked Akhmet.

The Eastern Caucasian mountaineers never shake hands. When two men greet each other, they merely clasp hands, with upstanding thumbs pressed closely together. There is no up-and-down motion of hands and arms.

"Who is this man in a white sheet and why is he wearing it ?"

"I'll tell you in a minute," he replied. "This man is after a horse, and he's got on a burial shroud. The other one will come back soon, and then you'll see."

Why a man in search of a horse should wear a burial shroud I could not possibly imagine; but the grave-clothes suggested murder or sudden death, and the matter was evidently serious.

In five or ten minutes the mountaineer who had been standing near us returned, bringing in his hand a small bag of Russian silver money. He counted out forty rubles, handed them to the other principal, and took in return the burial shroud and a small silver coin known in the eastern Caucasus as an abaz. Then, wrapping himself in the shroud, he bowed formally to the man from whom he had received it, and again left the room.

"For heaven's sake," I said to Akhmet, "tell me what it all means! Who are these two men? Why does one buy a burial shroud from the other, and what has a horse got to do with it?"

Akhmet's explanation was more or less fragmentary and disconnected, owing to the fact that while talking to me in Russian he was exchanging comments on the transaction in another language with half a dozen of the excited bystanders; but from what he said I gathered that six months before this time a certain man-neither of the two principals whom we had seen-had lost a horse. He did not know certainly whether it had been stolen or had merely strayed; but some weeks later he heard that the animal had been seen in the possession of a mountaineer who lived twenty-five or thirty miles away in another part of the Avar territory. He girded on all his weapons, wrapped himself in a burial shroud, provided himself with a small silver coin to be used in paying a mullah for reading prayers over a grave, and went in search of his lost property. The shroud and silver coin were significant of his determination to recover the horse, even at the risk of death. If the unlawful possessor made peaceable surrender, well and good; if not, he would fight for it; and he showed that he had considered all possible consequences by coming in a burial shroud and bringing with him money to pay the expenses of a funeral. was a horse or a grave for one man or the other.

It

In this particular case it appeared that the

possessor of the horse had neither found it nor stolen it, but had innocently bought it, in good faith, from another man. He there fore gave it up peaceably to the owner, and, taking in return the white sheet and the prayer-money, he girded on his weapons, wrapped himself in the shroud, and went in search of the mountaineer who had sold the animal to him. He wanted a return of the purchase money, and he, too, was prepared to fight, die, and be buried if such should be his fate. In this way the shroud and the silver coin had passed through the hands of two or three different men before we saw them, and were still on their way back to the man who had originally found the horse or stolen it. He would have to refund the money that he had received for the animal when he sold it, and then, if he had not been guilty of theft, the whole matter would be dropped, the shroud and the silver coin remaining in the hands of the last man.

"What an extraordinary custom !" I said to Akhmet when all the mountaineers had gone and we were left alone. "When did it begin and who started it?"

He shrugged his shoulders and merely said, "It's a very old adat."

"But would the two men that we saw to-night actually have fought if the money had not been refunded?"

"Of course!" he replied, as if surprised that I should ask so foolish a question. 66 One of them would have killed the other. They would not have fought in the housein our Daghestan you can't kill a man in a house-but the man in the shroud would have waited outside."

"Then what would have happened to the survivor ?" I asked. "Would anything have been done to him?"

"Who can tell what would have happened?" replied Akhmet. "The man left alive would become the blood enemy of the other one's eldest brother and would have to

go into kanle. Then he might be killed or might not.

Who knows?"

to sleep. The strangeness of my environment, the wailing cry of the village muezzincalling the faithful to late evening prayers, the consciousness of the severed human hand nailed against the back of my door, and the remembrance of the man in the burial shroud, whose dramatic entrance had suggested a medieval "vision of sudden death," all united to give me a realizing sense of tenth-century conditions and a vague feeling of personal insecurity. It was even a sort of comfort, in the lonely hours of the night, to recall the assurance of the homicide who slept beside me that "in our Daghestan you can't kill a man in a house."

In the eastern Caucasus at that time murder for the sake of robbery was not common, and was little to be feared; but in the wilder parts of the country the danger of provoking assault by giving offense inadvertently was one to which the inexperienced traveler was always more or less exposed. Individual conduct and social intercourse were regulated only by adat-a very ancient and variable code of customary law; and the mountaineers, who all carried deadly weapons, had not only a keen sense of personal dignity, but a sort of fierce, sensitive pride, which impelled them to resent instantly anything that had even the appearance of an insult. Careful as I was to avoid words or behavior that might be misconstrued or taken amiss, I got into difficulties twice, once with a mountaineer in whose house we spent a night soon after we entered Daghestan, and again with Akhmet.

The misunderstanding with our host, in the first case, was the result of my offering him money. He had given Akhmet and me shelter overnight and had taken care of our three horses, and it seemed to me that it would be rather shabby to go on our way without paying for our food and lodging. Just before we started, therefore, in the morning, I offered him two rubles. He barely glanced at the money, and then, putting his hand quickly to the hilt of his long, doubleedged kinjal, he gave me the most searching, penetrating, and at the same time men

evidently thought that I meant to insult him. I saw instantly that I had blundered, and I have no doubt that my face looked like that. of a reprimanded school-boy as I hastily put the two-ruble note in my pocket. Just at that moment, to my great relief, Akhmet came up, and the mountaineer, turning to him, said