PROCEEDINGS OF THE COTTESWOLD CLUB I57 



eyes, and struck up a strange wild melody in his own 

 tongue. He was a very remarkable-looking man : tall, 

 powcrfully-l)uilt, and with a face so exactly of the type of 

 the Assyrian Kings that he might just have stepped off 

 one of the Nineveh slabs in the British Museum* " Was 

 the wine good ? " asked our interpreter, as soon as he had 

 come to a pause in his song. " Nay," replied Belshazzar, 

 " It is my heart that is good, because I shall now soon 

 be with mv wife and children ; " and then he closed his 

 eyes again, and continued his song. The notes were 

 strange and wild : unlike anything European ; but they 

 struck me as the more strange because I had heard them 

 once before. Four years previously curiosity had led 

 some members of my family into the great Synagogue at 

 Frankfort, near the old historic house of the Rothschilds. 

 Part of the service consisted of a chant by a youth of 

 fifteen : a strange, wild, high-pitched waiUng, rather than 

 what would be classed as music by a European ear. And 

 here, under Mount Kazbek, was an Asiatic, of kindred 

 type with the Jew, if not himself a Hebrew, singing the 

 same notes; the same "motif" intonation I had heard 

 in the Synagogue at Frankfort. 



What could be the clue to this riddle ? Asia certainly 

 had not borrowed this music from Europe ; but an Asiatic 

 people who at this day form a colony 30,000 strong in a 

 great European city, must have carried it there. Further : 

 this people, " scattered and peeled " from their own land 

 for eighteen hundred 3'ears, were five-and-twenty hundred 

 years ago dwellers on the banks of the Euphrates, at no 

 very great distance from here. They must have carried 

 the tune from the same source from which our Georgian's 

 ancestor's brought it. 



* The persistence of the type is wonderful. If I believed in the transmigr.ition of 

 souls, I should say th.it I have seen two of the old Assyrian Kings, dressed in the 

 uniform of Russian officers, sitting down at a table in the hotel at Elizabethpol, drink- 

 ing a bottle of wine together ! I only wish I could have photographed them, to 

 enable the reader to appreciate the uncanny feeling that crept over me at the time. 



K 



