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"Can you tell me how it is that that heavily-laden cart of yours is being drawn without any difficulty by four oxen, whilst six cattle are scarcely able to move mine, empty though it is, and with all those Ossetes helping?" He smiled slyly and threw me a meaning glance. "You have not been in the Caucasus long, I should say?" "About a year," I answered. He smiled a second time. "Well?"
The Tcherkesse dialect is one of the most difficult to pronounce, some of the consonants being produced in a manner so loud and guttural that no European has yet been able to acquire it. In the Caucasus also dwell the Abazes who have never left the shores of the Black Sea, where they have been settled from time immemorial and the Ossetes, or As, who belong to the Indo-Germanic stock.
Our drivers, declaring that no avalanches had yet fallen, spared the horses by conducting us round the mountain. At a turning we met four or five Ossetes, who offered us their services; and, catching hold of the wheels, proceeded, with a shout, to drag and hold up our cart.
"And an utterly stupid people too!" he replied. "Would you believe it, they are absolutely ignorant and incapable of the slightest civilisation! Why even our Kabardians or Chechenes, robbers and ragamuffins though they be, are regular dare-devils for all that. Whereas these others have no liking for arms, and you'll never see a decent dagger on one of them! Ossetes all over!"
Then for the last time I gazed down upon the valley; but the thick mist which had gushed in billows from the gorges veiled it completely, and not a single sound now floated up to our ears from below. The Ossetes surrounded me clamorously and demanded tips; but the staff-captain shouted so menacingly at them that they dispersed in a moment. "What a people they are!" he said.
The hay, in such case, is divided among the separate households, and it is evident that no one has the right of taking hay from a neighbour's stack without his permission; but the limitation of this last rule among the Caucasian Ossetes is most noteworthy.
About a score of Georgians and mountaineers were gathered there in a noisy crowd, and, close by, a caravan of camels had halted for the night. I was obliged to hire oxen to drag my cart up that accursed mountain, as it was now autumn and the roads were slippery with ice. Besides, the mountain is about two versts in length. There was no help for it, so I hired six oxen and a few Ossetes.
The sun set, and as usually is the case in the south night followed upon the day without any interval of twilight. Thanks, however, to the sheen of the snow, we were able easily to distinguish the road, which still went up the mountain-side, though not so steeply as before. I ordered the Ossetes to put my portmanteau into the cart, and to replace the oxen by horses.
Hanoteau et Letourneux, La kabylie, ii. 58. The same respect to strangers is the rule with the Mongols. Society, xiv. 1, Tiflis, 1890, p. 68. They also took the oath of not marrying girls from their own union, thus displaying a remarkable return to the old gentile rules. Dm. The "joint team" is as common among the Lezghines as it is among the Ossetes.
In case of a murder it usually exceeded all the possible fortune of the murderer "Eighteen times eighteen cows" is the compensation with the Ossetes who do not know how to reckon above eighteen, while with the African tribes it attains 800 cows or 100 camels with their young, or 416 sheep in the poorer tribes.
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