The above are only a few extracts from a long and detailed code of criminal law written in Arabic and preserved in the mosque of an East Caucasian village. The separate rules are known as _adats_, or precedents, and the system of jurisprudence founded upon them is called "trial by adat," to distinguish it from the course of procedure laid down in the Koran and known as "trial by _shariat_." It is hardly necessary to say that in such a state of society as that reflected in this barbarous and archaic code of laws there must exist the elements of the profoundest tragedy and almost infinite possibilities of suffering. Out of grief, tragedy and suffering grows the literature of heroism, bearing fruit in such fierce triumphant songs as the one which follows. It is supposed to be sung by the spirit of a mountaineer who has been killed in battle: THE DEATH-SONG OF THE CHECHENSE. The earth is drying on my grave, and thou art forgetting me, O my own mother! The weeds are overgrowing my burial-place, and they deaden even thy sorrow, O my aged father! The tears fall no more from the eyes of my sister, and from her heart the misery is passing away; But do not thou forget me, O my elder brother! until thou shalt have avenged my death; And do not thou forget me, O my younger 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.