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I was so glad to have reached the end of my journey, that I poured a glass of Hungarian wine into the river, and made a second libation to the genius of the mountain in which the Terek rises. The Ossetes, who thought I was performing a religious ceremony, observed me gravely.
"However," continues Klaproth, "after meeting again the Sarmatic Medes of the ancients in this people, it is still more surprising also to recognize the Alains, who occupied the districts north of the Caucasus." He adds: "It follows from all we have said, that the Ossetes, who call themselves Irons, are the Medes, who assumed the name of Irans, and whom Herodotus styles the Arioi.
"Just so, sir," he answered. "They're terrible beasts, these Asiatics! You think that all that shouting means that they are helping the oxen? Why, the devil alone can make out what it is they do shout. The oxen understand, though; and if you were to yoke as many as twenty they still wouldn't budge so long as the Ossetes shouted in that way of theirs.... Awful scoundrels!
Travellers always stop there in bad weather, sir. They say," he added, pointing to the Ossetes, "that they will lead us there if you will give them a tip." "I know that, my friend, I know that without your telling me," said the staff-captain. "Oh, these beasts! "You must confess, however," I said, "that we should be worse off without them." "Just so, just so," he growled to himself.
Take, for instance, what he says of his trip to the sources of the Terek, the site of which had been pretty accurately indicated by Guldenstædt, although he had not visited them. "I left the village of Utzfars-Kan on the 17th March, on a bright but cold morning. Fifteen Ossetes accompanied me.
For the Scandinavians, wholly, the Germans to a great extent, the Slavonian and the Finnish tribes, some of the inhabitants of Greece, many Turks, some Kirghis, and some Mantchous, the Ossetes in the Caucasus, the Siahposh, the Rohillas, are at the present day fair, yellow or red haired, and blue-eyed; and the interpolation of tribes of Mongolian hair and complexion, as far west as the Caspian Steppes and the Crimea, might justly be accounted for by those subsequent westward irruptions of the Mongolian stock, of which history furnishes abundant testimony.
On the right was a cliff, on the left a precipice, so deep that an entire village of Ossetes at the bottom looked like a swallow's nest. I shuddered, as the thought occurred to me that often in the depth of night, on that very road, where two wagons could not pass, a courier drives some ten times a year without climbing down from his rickety vehicle.
In studying the present customs of the Ossetes their joint families and communes and their judiciary conceptions Professor Kovalevsky, in a remarkable work on Modern Custom and Ancient Law was enabled step by step to trace the similar dispositions of the old barbarian codes and even to study the origins of feudalism.
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