RUSSIA: Ageless in Eden

Summer snows rest eternally on the high, craggy peaks of the Russian Caucasus mountains where the loftiest pinnacle in Europe, Mt. Elbrus, reaches 18,481 feet into the sky. Yet the deep green Caucasus valleys are lush with camphor trees, tangerines, bananas and even tropical palms. There, Caucasian tradition has it, the Garden of Eden was located, and there, as in Author James Hilton’s mythical Tibetan valley of Shangri-La, native tribesmen live an incredibly long time. Ages well over 100 are commonplace in the Caucasus, a land of mixed nationalities which include gypsies from India, Turks, pure-blooded Semites, Finns, Mongolians and Negroes from Africa.

The handsomest of all the Caucasians are the aristocratic Abkhasians, who trace their lineage back to Prometheus; if the stranger doesn’t believe it, they point out the Caucasian rock to which he was chained by Zeus for stealing the Olympian fire. Local legends say that the Abkhasians are endowed with a beauty that must one day prove their undoing, but from the Caucasus last week came news that one of the handsomest of them all was still doing fine. Mamsir Kiut was a boy of 17 when Napoleon marched on Moscow. In the village of Kindig, he took time off from tending his chickens and pruning his vines, to pose in turban-like bashlyk for a 154th birthday portrait.