i68 CASUALS IN THE CAUCASUS 



when our servant took us down several pegs by re- 

 marking that none of his clan [ever beat a drum to 

 welcome any Frank — they all hated Franks. He 

 himself had only got used to them by going among 

 them in the cities and taking them in quantities, 

 gulping them down, as it were. 



After this set-back we rather lost interest in the pro- 

 ceedings and the little crowd trailed away to a burial- 

 ground set on the shoulders of a frowning escarpment, 

 down the sheer face of which Schamyl and his adherents 

 was said to have escaped by a track only known to the 

 mountain men, just as a body of Russians, hot on the 

 scent, thought they had the Caucasian Phoenix in 

 their sparrow-net. 



There is something so romantic in the history of 

 Schamyl, so alluringly heroic, that the more you hear 

 of his escapes the more you like it, and even the 

 desolate wastes of Daghestan, crossed by us where 

 hundreds of gallant Russians lie beneath the stones, 

 left us shamefully unmoved. 



All one thinks of is Schamyl — Schamyl, whose 

 biographers, like all biographers, have but two 

 views of him. He is either a devil or a demi-god. 

 And the fanatical leader was neither. Just — a 

 man who knew himself. Swift told us that no 

 man ever made an ill figure who understood his 

 own talents, nor a good one who mistook them. 

 The Caucasian hero, more than any other powerful 

 character in the great struggle, illustrated this memor- 

 able saying. Schamyl understood his own peculiar 

 abilities. The attributes of a leader, of an actor, were 



