f you feel so
disposed, on the slow-moving ice of a glacier.

High up among the peaks of this great Caucasian range lives, and has lived
for centuries, one of the most interesting and remarkable peoples of
modern times--a people which is interesting and remarkable not only on
account of the indomitable bravery with which it defended its
mountain-home for two thousand years against all comers, but on account
of its originality, its peculiar social and political organization and its
innate intellectual capacity. I call it a "people" rather than a race,
because it comprises representatives of many races, and yet belongs, as a
whole, to none of them. It is a collection of miscellaneous elements. 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 together the surviving Robinson Crusoes of a score of shipwrecked
states and nationalities, the fugitive mutineers of a hundred tribal
Bountys. Army after army has gone to pieces in the course of the last four
thousand 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 has at one time or another crossed, passed by or dwelt
near this great Caucasian range, and each has contributed in turn its
quota to the heterogeneous population of the mountain-valleys. The
Indo-Germanic tribes as they migrated westward from Central Asia left
there a few wearied and dissatisfied stragglers; their number was
increased by deserters from the Greek and Roman armies of Alexander the
Great and Pompey; the Mongols under Tamerlane, as they marched through
Daghestan, added a few more; the Arabs who overran the country in the
eighth century established military colonies in the mountains, which
gradually blended with the previous inhabitants; European crusaders,
wandering back from the Holy Land, stopped there to rest, and never
resumed their journey; and finally, the oppressed and persecuted of all
the neighboring nations--Jews, Georgians, Armenians and Tatars--fled to
these rugged, inaccessible mountains as to a city of refuge where they
might live and worship their gods in peace. In course of time these
innumerable fragments of perhaps a hundred different trib