brother! until thou
shalt lie beside me.
Thou art hot, O bullet! and thou bringest death, but hast thou
not been my true slave?
Thou art black, O earth! and thou coverest me, but have I not
spurned thee under my very horses' feet?
Thou art cold, O death! but I _have_ been _thy_ master.
My body is the inheritance of earth, but my soul rises in
triumph to heaven.

It would be hard to find in any literature a song which breathes a
fiercer, more indomitable, spirit of heroism than this. The mountaineer
is dead; he can fight no more; his body lies in the black earth; but his
freed soul is as proud, defiant and unconquerable as ever. He takes a
fierce delight even beyond the grave in taunting the bullet which has
killed him with having once been his slave; in reminding the earth which
covers him that he has spurned it under his horses' hoofs; and in
mocking and defying even death itself. They have destroyed his body, but
nothing has subdued, or ever can subdue, the brave, proud spirit which
tenanted it. That, and not the body, was the man's true self, and that
still lives to exult over bullet, grave and death.

So far is the true mountaineer from being afraid of death, that he
seems to take a savage pleasure in imagining it in its most horrible
forms and dwelling upon its most repulsive and terrifying features,
merely to have the satisfaction of triumphing over it in fancy. As an
illustration of this I give below a part of another Chechense song
called "The Song of Khamzat." Khamzat was a celebrated _abrek_, or
Caucasian Berserker, who harried the Russian armed line of the Terek
with bloody and destructive raids before and during the reign of the
great Caucasian hero Shamyl. He was finally overtaken and surrounded by
a large Russian force on the summit of a high hill near the river Terek,
called the Circassian Gora. Finding it impossible to escape, he and his
men slaughtered their horses, built a breastwork of their bodies, and
behind this bloody half-living wall fought until they were literally
annihilated. The song of which the following are the closing lines was
composed in commemoration of Khamzat's heroic defence and death. Just
before the final Russian onset he is supposed to see a bird flying over
the field of battle in the direction of his native village, and he
addresses it as follows:

O aerial bird! carry to Akh V