The Shadow of the Gloomy East. Ferdynand Antoni Ossendowski

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СКАЧАТЬ a long while Maxim stripped off his clothes, picked up a little broom made of dry grass, dipped it in hot water, and seated himself in the darkest corner of the room. He commenced a conversation with someone invisible, intermingling his speech with interjections: "A kysh! A kysh!" and beating lightly with his little broom as if striking at somebody.

      The corner was of course crowded with black and grey and sometimes transparent creatures. It was to them that the old wizard was talking; he was whipping them gently; he would not see or understand that they were nothing but the fleeting shadows of the flickering light which darted about, flashing and vanishing away.

      "Now they won't come!" said the old man at last in a tone of thorough conviction.

      Of course they did not come and I had an excellent bath.

      The passion for horse-stealing is characteristic of ​the Russian nation. It is undoubtedly an atavistic remnant inheritant from their forefathers, the Mongol nomads and Finnish pagans. Even the criminal law was of very doubtful application in the Russian Courts in cases of horse-stealing. This is an interesting racial peculiarity. All nomads, even the God-fearing, honest Mongols of Khalcki are accomplished horse-lifters. Galloping off with your neighbours' cattle is in their eyes a chivalrous adventure, a proof of courage and skill, for on such an expedition the galloper is thrown on his own resources, whilst he is laying himself open to serious penalties.

      The Mongolian prairie law, transplanted into the plains of the Volga like that of Red Indians, lays down clearly enough that horse-theft is a great felony, but the law is honored in the breach rather than in the observance, and allows the wronged to get his horse back any way he can and to punish the thief at will.

      The culprit, if caught, is cruelly lynched, and the State Court winks benevolently at the execution of the unwritten law.

      The Russian peasant, if he was unable to track the thief, would consult a wizard, who had made this his special department. The latter, having listened to the tale of theft, advised the owner to come again during night-time and to bring the bridle of the horse, some dung from the stables, and a bushel of oats.

      I witnessed such a performance in the district of Walday, in the province of Novgorod.

      ​We called at about ten in the evening with the Injured peasant on the sorcerer. We knocked at the door. He told the peasant to throw a handful of oats in each of the four corners of the cottage and to strike with the bridle at the single window in the easterly wall. This done, the window was lighted and we were allowed to enter.

      The small, low room was hot and close. By the stove there was burning a piece of resinous wood which had been thrust into a cleft in the cracked stones and emitted a cloud of smoke. In the purple shine of the fire I beheld bridles hanging down from the ceiling, horsetails and skins, tufts of grass and herbs and little bags blackened with smoke.

      In front of the stove sat a little grey-haired man with conspiciously squinting eyes, open-mouthed, showing two rows of black teeth, and wearing a look of inquisitive fear.

      He took the bridle, examined it carefully, smelled it, tried its hardness with his teeth, and then all of a sudden he burst into a terrific yell:

      "The horse was led away … driven far away … very far … it's a good horse … all foaming … neighing … breaking away for home. … Turn … here's good oats for you … ta … ta … ta … little horse … come … come here!"

      During the invocation he cast upon the coals handfuls of oats, gazing intently into the leaping tongues of fire.

      ​He jumped up, tore from the celling a bundle of grass and threw it on the coals. … The dry stalks and leaves twisted, stretched like snakes and burst into flame. Next the old man threw into the stove horse-dung, and as the smoke rose up, he bent over the coals and said in a whisper:

      "The horse … the horse. … A broad road … a highway … three cottages … a burnt fir-tree … a meadow with a blackened haystack. … A tall lean man leads a horse … a shaven head, a scar upon his forehead, and he limps,"

      "I know him! I know him!" shouted the peasant "It's Kuzma! The gipsy from Neshetilov. He won't escape me this time!"

      With these words he rushed out of the room, I went home, and a few days afterwards I learned that the peasant, with the assistance of his two sons and his son-in-law, surprised the gipsy, bound him to his own horse and dragged him back into the village.

      Here the crowd set on him, beat him, bruised his legs and arms, tore his hair, ordering him to say at once where the horse was hidden. The poor fellow swore by all the saints that he had not seen the horse, that he knew nothing about it, but the crowd would not believe him. Like mad, they beat him again, trampled upon him, until one of the frenzied lynchers finally finished him with a pitchfork.

      The body was buried in a waste field, and a pale planted on the grave by way of memorial.

      ​This is the emblem of the ancient law of the Golden Horde, which ordains that the captured horse-thief should be impaled. Such an execution, however, requiring too many preparations, it is easier for the crowd to beat the culprit to death, and afterwards to impale the dead body within its grave.

      The demon-worship or shamanism is quite comprehensible in the vast desert of the North, where Nature unlooses a veritable inferno of multifarious and terrifying voices; where the hurricanes, blowing from the Arctic Ocean, claim death; where the quagmires breathe plague, emit pestilence; where savage men and beasts run wild, carrying death in their despondent, hunger-glowing eyes; where the earth and the air are overcloyed with the blood, the groans, and the curses of those whom the Tsars and their intelligent bureaucracy cast into the bottomless pit of solitary torture and death, solely because they strove for freedom, giving them the freedom of the boundless desert of snow in which, like stones in the depths of an unfathomable sea, were lost without trail hundreds and thousands of tombs of martyrs!

      In those God-forsaken regions shamanism appears a natural phenomenon amongst the savage tribes of nomads.

      Still, even in Russia proper, even near the capital, its existence is revealed.

      I knew two instances.

      I was a student at that time spending my holidays ​with a doctor, a friend of mine, in the Kola peninsula. We were travelling in the province of Olonetz, and before reaching the town of Petrozavodsk we had to stay the night in a large village a few miles from the town. We went to the local inn, the usual den, not too clean, damp, and pervaded with the fumes of alcohol.

      After the evening meal, we retired into our room to load cartridges for our sporting guns, as we had expended our ammunition on the way.

      We were just beginning operations when there was a cautious knock on the door. A pale, emaciated little fellow came in; he was dressed in a long black coat, like a monastic servant. But the face of the man glowed with its huge, burning, and piercing eyes.

      I remember well the fear that crept upon me involuntarily under their gaze.

      "What do you want?" asked the doctor, throwing a measure of powder into the husk without raising his eyes.

      "I came to invoke the spirits for you," replied the visitor gravely.

      The measure fell from my friend's fingers as he lifted his amazed look upon the newcomer.

      "Spirits? he asked, shrugging his shoulders.

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