CHAPTER III 



CAUCASIA AND ITS PEOPLES 



As I travell'd hither through the land 

 I find the people strangely fantasied. 



King John. 



A great feast of languages. 



Love's Labour s Lost. 



In the days of my youth a map of the Caucasus was 

 suddenly required of me, and I remember pains- 

 takingly fining in an oasis of white paper with a sort 

 of herring-bone arrangement, which represented, to 

 my mind at least, a continuous mountain chain 

 stretching from sea to sea. Here, on the peaks of the 

 mighty range, my fancy estabHshed the romantic 

 race of people whom my governess, a lady with 

 " views " on pronunciation, called " Circazshons," 

 whose women, beautiful houris, Hved in a chronic 

 state of being clapped into harems by the hated Turk ; 

 whose men spent all their days in valiant struggles to 

 get them out again. 



The geographical and topographical side of the 

 Caucasus has been so systematically " done " by 

 various writers that it seems almost a reductio ad ab- 

 surdum for a casual farer like myself to dip into oro- 

 graphy at all, but for the benefit of those who rarely 

 tackle important works on exploration and ethnology, 



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