Life of Schamyl | Page 3

the end of, in the enjoyment of a large degree of natural liberty, in obedience to ancient laws and usages, in the respect of age, virtue, and superiority in arms, and now furnish the only specimen left of tribes of men still living in all the simplicity, and retaining, along with the practice of some of the semi-barbarous vices, all the heroism of the so-called age of gold.
Georgia, which lies on the southern declivities of the Caucasus, was nominally converted to Christianity in the days of Constantine the Great, when its heroic queen Thamar ruled over one of the most powerful empires of western Asia; but beautiful on these mountain tops as were the feet of those who brought the glad tidings and published peace, the doctrines of the cross made but little impression on the benighted minds of these worshippers in the temple of nature. Nor though Russia early endeavored to introduce the peaceful soldiers of the church into the fastnesses where she could not penetrate with her secular dragoons, the native heart continued to hold to the simple religious rites handed down by tradition from the fathers, and finally relinquished them only within the last hundred years in exchange for the doctrines of the Prophet, which, though introduced a couple of centuries before, at the point of the spears of the Crimean Khans, were then first made plain and acceptable by missionaries from Turkey.
For subsistence the Caucasian tribes have always relied mainly on pasturage and agriculture, also on the chase, on rapine and the spoils of war, and on the exchange of their natural products and slaves for the salt, gunpowder, and manufactured goods of foreigners. So constant for centuries has been their attachment to the mountains that they have never emigrated to the plains, the life of which they despise. Only the harems of Constantinople have an attraction for their females; and a few restless youth, wandering at different times into foreign parts, have furnished bodyguards to the sultans of Turkey and the Khans of the Crimea; have served under the name of Mamelukes in Egypt, where Mehemet Ali could not control but only massacre them; and latterly have graced the parade days of the Russian capital, where, treated like pet lions, their fiery spirit of independence and impatience of discipline have been but mildly restrained by the Czar, and where such is their haughty, imposing bearing, that whenever the vulgar crowd in the streets gives way for the coming of any one, it has become almost a proverb to say, it is either a general officer in the army or a Circassian.

III.
THE WAR WITH RUSSIA.
The contest between the Circassians and the Russians may be said to have originated as far back as the middle ages. For it was in the tenth century that the grand duke Sw?toslaff, overrunning a portion of the Bosphoric territories, came into collision with the inhabitants of the Caucasus; and in the sixteenth, the Russians under the grand duke Wassiljewitsch made their appearance on the Caspian, on the western coast of which they established garrisons as far south as Tarku. In the latter century also the Kabardian princes, whose territory consisting of open valleys was less defended by nature against the inroads of enemies, bowed their necks for a time in submission; and Georgia, on the Asiatic slope, took in the person of her king Alexander the oath of vassalage to the Muscovite, obtaining a master where she had asked only for a protector. But occupied during the next two hundred years with affairs at the north, the Russian princes lost their possessions and most of their influence in the Caucasus; and it was not until 1722 that the far-seeing ambition of the great Peter brought him to the "Albanian gates" of Derbend, and even within sight of the sacred fires of the promontory of Apsheron.
It was permitted to this most gifted of the czars to behold these mountains and get a glimpse of the fair Asiatic vales beyond, but not to possess them. In leaving, however, to his successors the legacy of his boundless ambition, he pointed with his dying hand to the peaks of Elbrus and Kasbek; and ever since his race, extending itself on all sides, has not ceased to press onward in this pathway to ward the rising of the sun.
Especially within the last quarter of a century has Russia occupied herself in earnest with the conquest of the Caucasus. During that period she has maintained there constantly a large force, and latterly as many as two hundred thousand men under arms. Year after year she has despatched her battalions to supply the places of those who had fallen by the shaskas of the Circassians or the still more deadly arrows of the fever, which in the most