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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



comers, but on account of its originality, 

 its peculiar social and political organiza- 

 tion, and its innate intellectual capacity. 

 I call it a people rather than a race, be- 

 cause it comprises representatives of 

 many races and yet belongs as a whole 

 to none of them. It is a heterogeneous 

 aggregation of human odds and ends 

 from all parts of the Old World. 



AN ISIvAND IN THK Se:a O^ HISTORY 



The Caucasian range may be regarded 

 for all ethnological purposes as a great 

 mountainous island in the sea of human 

 history, and on that island now live to- 

 gether the surviving Robinson Crusoes 

 of a score of ship-wrecked states and 

 nationalities — the fugitive mutineers of a 

 hundred tribal Bounties. 



Army after army has gone to pieces in 

 the course of the last 4,000 years upon 

 that titanic reef ; people after people has 

 been driven up into its wild ravines by 

 successive waves of migration from the 

 south and east.; band after band of 

 deserters, fugitives, and mutineers has 

 sought shelter there from the storms, 

 perils, and hardships of war. Almost 

 every nation in Europe, in whole or in 

 part, and at one time or another, has 

 crossed, passed by, or dwelt near this 

 great Caucasian range, and each in turn 

 has contributed its quota to the hetero- 

 geneous population of the mountain val- 

 leys. 



The Aryan tribes, as they migrated 

 westward from central Asia, left a few 

 stragglers among the peaks of this great 

 range ; their number was increased by 

 deserters from the Greek and Roman 

 armies of Alexander the Great and Pom- 

 pey; the Mongols under Tamerlane, as 

 they marched through Daghestan, added 

 a few more. So, too, the Arabs, who 

 overran the country in the eighth century, 

 established military colonies in the moun- 

 tains, which gradually blended with the 

 pre-existing population. European Cru- 

 saders, wandering back from the Holy 

 Land, stopped there to rest and never 

 resumed their homeward journey. Fi- 

 nally, the oppressed and persecuted of all 

 neighboring lands — Jews, Georgians, 

 Persians, Armenians, and Tatars — fled to 

 these rugged, almost inaccessible moun- 



tains as to a city of refuge where they 

 might live and w^orship their gods in 

 peace. 



HOW the: mountains made) a nation 



In course of time these innumerable 

 fragments of perhaps a hundred differ- 

 ent communities or tribes, united only by 

 the bonds of a common interest, were 

 molded by topographical environment 

 into a single conglomerate nationality, 

 and became known to their lowland 

 neighbors as gortse, or mountaineers. 

 From a mere assemblage of stragglers, 

 fugitives, and colonists they developed 

 in the course of a thousand years into 

 a brave, hardy, self-reliant people, and 

 as early as the eighth century they had 

 established in the mountain fastnesses of 

 Daghestan, at the eastern end of the 

 range, a large number of so-called "free 

 societies," which were governed by elect- 

 ive franchise, without distinction of birth 

 or rank. After that time, for another 

 thousand years, they were never con- 

 quered. 



Both the Turks and the Persians at 

 different periods held the nominal sov- 

 ereignty of the country, but so far as the 

 mountaineers were concerned it was only 

 nominal. Army after army was sent 

 against them, only to return broken and 

 defeated, until at last among the Per- 

 sians it passed into a proverb : "If the 

 Shah becomes too proud, just let him 

 make war with the highlanders of Da- 

 ghestan." 



In 1801 these hitherto unconquered 

 mountaineers came into conflict with the 

 titanic power of Russia, and after a long 

 and desperate struggle of nearly sixty 

 years they were finally subdued and the 

 Caucasus became a part of the Russian 

 Empire. 



At the present time the mountaineers 

 as a class, from the Circassians of the 

 Black Sea coast to the Lesghians of the 

 Caspian, may be roughly described as a 

 brave, hardy, liberty-loving people, who 

 have descended from ancestors of widely 

 different ethnological types and who are 

 separable into tribes, or clans, of very 

 different outward appearance ; but who, 

 nevertheless, are surprisingly alike in all 



