and strength,
and youth... and the mountains!'

Chapter IV

That whole part of the Terek line (about fifty miles) along which lie
the villages of the Grebensk Cossacks is uniform in character both as
to country and inhabitants. The Terek, which separates the Cossacks
from the mountaineers, still flows turbid and rapid though already
broad and smooth, always depositing greyish sand on its low reedy right
bank and washing away the steep, though not high, left bank, with its
roots of century-old oaks, its rotting plane trees, and young
brushwood. On the right bank lie the villages of pro-Russian, though
still somewhat restless, Tartars. Along the left bank, back half a mile
from the river and standing five or six miles apart from one another,
are Cossack villages. In olden times most of these villages were
situated on the banks of the river; but the Terek, shifting northward
from the mountains year by year, washed away those banks, and now there
remain only the ruins of the old villages and of the gardens of pear
and plum trees and poplars, all overgrown with blackberry bushes and
wild vines. No one lives there now, and one only sees the tracks of the
deer, the wolves, the hares, and the pheasants, who have learned to
love these places. From village to village runs a road cut through the
forest as a cannon-shot might fly. Along the roads are cordons of
Cossacks and watch-towers with sentinels in them. Only a narrow strip
about seven hundred yards wide of fertile wooded soil belongs to the
Cossacks. To the north of it begin the sand-drifts of the Nogay or
Mozdok steppes, which fetch far to the north and run, Heaven knows
where, into the Trukhmen, Astrakhan, and Kirghiz-Kaisatsk steppes. To
the south, beyond the Terek, are the Great Chechnya river, the
Kochkalov range, the Black Mountains, yet another range, and at last
the snowy mountains, which can just be seen but have never yet been
scaled. In this fertile wooded strip, rich in vegetation, has dwelt as
far back as memory runs the fine warlike and prosperous Russian tribe
belonging to the sect of Old Believers, and called the Grebensk
Cossacks.

Long long ago their Old Believer ancestors fled from Russia and settled
beyond the Terek among the Chechens on the Greben, the first range of
wooded mountains of Chechnya. Living among the Chechens the Cossacks
intermarried with them and adopted the manners and customs of the hill
tribes, though they still retained th