de through the
still evening air over the silent village, dying away at last in a long
musical cry of _La illaha il Allah!_ ("There is no God but God"). Amid
profound silence Kazi Mullah--for the gray-bearded stranger was that
renowned priest--stretched out his hand over the crowded courtyard and
with slow stern gravity said:

"Upon all your merrymakings and feasts, upon all your marriages and
rejoicings, upon yourselves, your children and your households, upon
everything that you do, have and are, rests the awful curse of God!
Heaven has marked you with the black seal of eternal damnation because
you still grovel in sin and refuse to obey the voice and teachings of
our holy Prophet. Your duty is to spread with the sword the light of our
holy faith throughout the world; but what have you done? what are you
doing? Miserable cowards! without faith and without religion! you pursue
eagerly the pleasures of this life, but you despise the law of God and
of his holy Prophet. Vain are your selfish prayers--vain is your daily
attendance at the mosque. Heaven rejects your heartless sacrifices. The
presence of the Russian infidel blocks up the way to the throne of God!
Repent, pray, and arm yourselves for the war of the Most High. The hour
draws near when I shall call you forth and consecrate you for the holy
sacrifice of battle."

This impassioned speech fell like a lighted torch into a perfect
powder-magazine of religious enthusiasm. Copies of it in Arabic were
borne from village to village by mounted Murids; other mullahs took up
Kazi's cry of _gazavat_ (war for the faith), using his speech as a text
for their excited harangues; and in less than a month the whole district
was in a blaze of insurrection. Kazi Mullah himself was the first victim
of the fire of war which his eloquence had kindled. He was killed while
fighting desperately at the storming of the aoul of Ghimry by a column
of Russian infantry under Baron Rosen, on October 17, 1832.

I have endeavored to give in the preceding songs and in the speech of
Kazi Mullah an idea of the nature and the spirit of Caucasian heroic
literature. I will turn now in closing to the literature of sorrow and
suffering, which is the black shadow cast by heroism across the
threshold of domestic life. Heroic literature is the voice of Caucasian
manhood: the literature of suffering is the cry of bereaved women.

The following lines are the lament of an Avarian girl whose lover has
been