erdi Mohammed, the ruler of Hikka,
our last farewell:
Bid good-bye to our sweethearts, the fair girls of Hikka,
And tell them that our breasts are a wall which will stop the
Russian bullets:
Tell them that we had hoped to lie in the graveyard of our
native village,
Where our sisters would have come to weep over our graves,
Where sorrowful relatives would have gathered to mourn our
death.
But God has not granted us this last favor: instead of the
weeping of sisters,
Over us will be heard the growls of fighting wolves;
Instead of sorrowing relatives, here will assemble clouds of
croaking ravens:
The ravens will drink up our eyes and the bloodthirsty wolves
will devour our bodies.
Tell them all, O bird! that on the Circassian mountain, in the
land of the infidel,
With naked sabres in our hands, we all lie dead.

The reader who merely sees this song on a printed page in an imperfect
prose translation can form little conception of the thrilling effect
which it produces when sung by an excited woman to the fierce wild music
of the Caucasian highlanders amid a group of Khamzat's fiery and
sensitive countrymen. Their faces flush with strong emotion, their hands
close with nervous grip upon the hilts of their long kinjals, and their
bright eyes slowly fill with tears of mingled grief, rage and pity as
the excited singer wails out the dying words of their lost leader.

The heroic poetry of the Caucasian mountaineers is largely taken up with
recitals of their freebooting exploits and achievements in the valley of
Georgia, usually in the form of songs or ballads, which all breathe the
same fierce, proud, cruel spirit. In the diction there is very little
art. Rhyme, although it is known to the mountaineers, is seldom used,
and their poetry is, as a rule, nothing more than rhythmical or blank
verse broken into irregular stanzas of from seven to eleven metrical
feet. This kind of verse they improvise with great readiness and
facility. It seems to be the form of expression which their stronger
feelings naturally take. I have heard an Avarian mother chant amid her
sobs an improvised but rhythmical lament over the body of her dead
child. Rude as Caucasian poetry is, however, in construction, fierce and
warlike as it generally is i