The men we saw around the railway stations are Tartars, whose love of society and excitement brings upon them the contempt of the phlegmatic Germans and Russians, who scorn such diversions. Their love of dress also excites the derision of their neighbours. They cling to the ancient Georgian costume and will not give it up. They wear the kalak — a long coat with a plaited skirt — and a hood of white woolen cloth, called a kabula, over their heads, with a long end and tassels hanging down their back. It is much more graceful than the fez but is not so dignified as the turban.
The Russian government is diverting immigrants to that section of the Caucasus from other parts of the empire. Although one of the oldest communities in the universe, it is still thinly settled. The revolution of the land-hungry peasants of European Russia in 1905 was followed by legislation in the duma similar to that of the British Parliament concerning Ireland, and the great estates are being purchased by the government, broken up into small farms and sold to the peasants on long time at a low rate of interest. This movement was hastened and the land owners were persuaded to sell by arguments similar to those used by the tenantry in Ireland. The landlords who still refuse to yield are having a hard time of it. Their barns are set on fire, their cattle are mutilated, their wheat fields are burned, and various other penalties are imposed upon them. There is now a law authorizing the compulsory expropriation of large estates, and the lands belonging to the crown and the church are being divided and disposed of slowly among peasant farmers imported from the more densely populated sections of central Russia.
There are many sturdy Germans there, descendants of immigrants who were induced to go into the Caucasus by Catherine the Great one hundred and twenty-five years ago. She gave them large grants of land and relieved them from taxation and military service, as an inducement to develop the natural wealth of her empire. By minding their own business they have managed to get along with the fiery-hearted and hot-tempered Tartars. The Germans make the best farmers and are the richest portion of the population. Armenians, Persians, and Greeks are the tradesmen and the same races furnish the mechanics and labourers. Representatives of all the races of central Asia are to be found there, and many of European stock, Latins and Greeks, Huns, Iberians, and Italians, because when the tidal waves of humanity, to which I have already referred, receded, a good deal of driftwood was always left behind.
Daghestan has been known to history for three thousand years. Josephus tells us of a race called the Alans, who dwelt upon the coast of the Caspian Sea and along the northern slopes of the Caucasus, whence, passing through "Iron Gates," they fell upon the Medes and nearly exterminated them. They invaded Armenia, eight hundred or nine hundred years before Christ, and laid everything waste behind them. They crossed over into Persia and made themselves at home in that country until they were driven out by Cyrus the Great. The "Iron Gates,'* so called, were a part of a great wall, like that of the Chinese, which, in prehistoric times, extended from the present city of Derbent on the shore of the Caspian Sea, to the mountain of Koushan-Dagh near the western limits of Daghestan. This wall is believed by several authorities to have been built a thousand years before the Christian era during the reign of a monarch called Nashrevan the Just, for the protection of his people, who lived north of the Caucasus, against the wild tribes of Asia. It was eighteen or twenty feet high and so thick that a squadron of cavalry could gallop along its top. Remnants are still preserved and the ruins of forty-three castles along its foundation have been counted between the mountains and the sea. There was only one passage, through the "Iron Gates" which remained in perfect preservation until the Middle Ages.
Arabian writers in the early part of the Christian era refer to it frequently as a gigantic work, and describe fortifications that were filled with soldiers, and impregnable to attack. The total length of the wall was two hundred and sixty-six miles so that the castles must have been about six miles apart. You will remember that the Romans built a similar wall across the north of England between Carlisle and Newcastle to keep the Highlanders out of Briton, and other defences of the kind have been known elsewhere. Oriental writers say that the hour of prayer used to be communicated along this wall by the sentinels five times a day.