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

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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 mediæval 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.

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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,' 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.

acre or more of flat village house-tops. The 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 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. It was a horse or a grave for one man or the other.

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 therefore 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 ?"

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"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?"

"Is one man allowed to kill another in that way without any punishment?" I asked. "In my country the killer would be hanged up by the neck until he was dead."

Akhmet laughed, as if the hanging of a man by the neck merely because he had killed another seemed to him funny. "In our Daghestan," he said, "to kill a man is all the same as to kill a chicken."

It was long that night before I could get

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to sleep. The strangeness of my environment, the wailing cry of the village muezzin calling 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 mediæval" 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 menacing look that I had ever encountered. He 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

with stern dignity, in which there was still an undertone of menace: "Tell your foreign traveler that we mountaineers don't sell our hospitality." Akhmet, with quick wit, explained that I had no thought of offering money to him-still less of insulting him. My intention was to have the two rubles given to the servant who had cooked the food. The mountaineer was appeased, but there was still a flush of anger in his face as he withdrew his hand from his kinjal.

"It isn't safe to do that," said Akhmet to me as we rode away from the village. "In our Daghestan you can't offer money to a man in whose house you have been a guest. It is a deadly insult."

The misunderstanding with Akhmet grew out of what seemed to me to be a perfectly innocent and natural remark, and I am still unable to explain the irritation that it caused. From the top of a high mountain ridge he was pointing out to me one afternoon the bridle-path that we were to follow the next day. From the depths of a valley at our feet it ran in a long series of zigzags up the side of a tremendous spur of the main range, which, from our point of view, was so deceptively foreshortened that it seemed to be absolutely perpendicular. Finally, at a height of six or seven thousand feet, the whitish, snake-like path disappeared in the clouds.

"That looks to me like a very dangerous road," I said.

Akhmet turned on me instantly, grasping the hilt of his kinjal, and his henna-red beard seemed to bristle and his eyes to flash blue lightning as he demanded: "What do you mean by saying that I am planning to take you over a dangerous road?”

"I don't mean anything," I replied in dismay. "Of course you wouldn't go over it if it weren't safe. I merely thought that it looks very steep." He continued to stare at me with a menacing look for at least half a minute. Then, turning away, he said: "I never take a man over a dangerous road. I could ride down that one blindfolded and in the night."

This was the only misunderstanding with Akhmet that I ever had, and why he resented so fiercely my innocent remark I don't know. I had thought more than once that it would be safe and easy to push a man off one of those high cornice paths and then rob his dead body; but Akhmet could hardly have been a mind-reader, and at that particular time I was not even thinking of such a

possibility. Why he behaved like a man mortally insulted I don't know. Possibly in his stormy past there had been some intimate connection between dangerous cliff roads and homicide.

For several days after this misunderstanding I did not venture to ask Akhmet any questions about his fights and feuds ; but in a high, lonely aoul near the precipice of Gimry, where we happened one day to be storm-bound and where we had little to do but talk, he voluntarily brought the subject up himself by asking whether, in my country, a man who had killed another could make peace with his blood-seekers. I replied that in most cases a man who killed another in my country was hanged or imprisoned for life by order of society; but that in some of our mountains where blood feuds were carried on I thought they were fought out to a finish.

"In our Daghestan," he said, "you can almost always make peace after a while by paying an indemnity. But sometimes you can't. Once, in an aoul south of Gunib, where I was hard pressed by my blood enemies, I had to take refuge in the house of a man whom I hardly knew, and I lived there night and day for three months."

"Do you mean without going out?"

"Yes. Four men with rifles watched that house constantly. How could I go out? I tried to make peace with them, and even offered them four horses, a dozen sheep, and six rolls of woolen cloth; but they wouldn't listen."

'Was the owner of the house willing to keep you all that time?"

He had to-that's the adat. In our Daghestan you can't turn a man out of a house when his blood-seekers are there watching for him. But when winter came on they went back to their homes. They lived more than sixty miles away, and they couldn't lie in wait for me forever.

"It was there that I got married," continued Akhmet, after a moment's reflection. "Living in the house night and day, I fell in love with a daughter of the man who gave me refuge."

"Then it wasn't such a bad thing for you, after all," I suggested.

"In one way, no," he replied. "But in another way it was. There was another man who wanted the girl, and the night that I was married he tried to spoil me."

"How spoil you ?”

"He hid under one of the windows of the mosque, and during the ceremony he tied knots in a cord and tried to work evil magic on me. I heard of it, and the next time I saw him we fought. That's where I got this scar," pointing to his forehead. "He nearly split my head open with his kinjal; but I had a pistol in my left hand, and I shot him and stabbed him before he could strike again. Then I had to go into kanle, and it was a bad business. He belonged to a strong family, and his brothers hunted me like a wolf. I didn't see my wife again for nearly a year, and it was two years before I could make peace."

"What do you do when you want to make peace?" I asked. "Is there an adat for that?"

"Yes; but the adat is not the same in all parts of the country. There are different adats."

“Tell me, then, just what you did when you made peace with the men who hunted you like a wolf."

"Well, first I let my hair grow.1 That was a year and a half after I killed the man who tried to spoil me, or perhaps more. Then some of my friends went to my bloodseekers and said: Akhmet is letting his hair grow it is more than two inches long already.'"

"But what had your hair got to do with it ?" I asked in amazement.

"When you let your hair grow long," he replied, "it means that you are sorry and want to end the feud. According to the adat, you must do that first. Then your relatives or friends open negotiations. Well, my friends talked and argued and bargained for a long time-two or three weeks. My enemies were willing to make peace, but the terms were too hard. There were four of them, and the father and eldest brother of the man I killed would not forgive me unless I would agree to pay a large indemnity and to join their family."

"But I don't understand," I interrupted. "How could the father whose son you had killed want you to join his family?"

"I don't mean that they wanted me to live with them," explained Akhmet. They only wanted me to take on my shoulders their blood feuds. I was known to be a good fighter, and they wanted me to help them kill off their enemies. But I didn't like to do

1 The Daghestan mountaineers either shave their heads or keep their hair closely clipped.

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that because their enemies were not mine, and they had a lot of them."

"Tell me one thing more," I interrupted again. "Are your blood feuds between whole families or between individuals? If a member of your family were killed, who would take up the feud? And would the avenger have a right to kill any member of the other family?"

"According to our Avar adat," said Akhmet, "the oldest brother is the first avenger; but there may be more than one. In my case there were four, because in the fight that started it I began the attack. But my four blood-seekers wouldn't have had a right to kill any one but me. In some of the clans families fight families, but our adat doesn't allow the killing of a blood enemy's relatives. That would be as bad as killing a man in a house."

"All right," I said. Go ahead."

"Now I understand.

Well, the hasty pudding that stood overnight didn't learn to talk. I was willing to pay an indemnity, but not to join the other family and take up its feuds. My friends did all they could for me, but my bloodseekers-may eagles drink their eyes!—gave me no peace; and after I had been shot at two or three times from ambush my wife persuaded me to yield."

Again a gloomy and savage expression darkened Akhmet's face as he recalled his humiliation, and for two or three minutes he stared silently into the embers of the cowdung fire.

"Well," I finally said, "what then? Did you make peace?"

"Yes," he said, with bitterness; " after an accursed ceremony of blood adoption, I made peace."

Again he relapsed into silence. He seemed disinclined to tell me any more, but by means of cautious and sympathetic questions I finally drew from him the following story:

After the arbitrators had settled the terms of peace, Akhmet had to return to the Lesghian village of Mukar, where his blood enemies as well as his wife's family lived, and there go through the ceremony of blood adoption. He was taken first to the house of the father whose son he had killed, and was there called upon to press his lips to the bared breast of his victim's old mother. This,

LA Caucasian proverb meaning that the broken-off and renewed negotiations did not come to anything.