Page:Armenian Literature.djvu/98

 “It is not here.”

“We have a sign. In the breast of our sister-in-law was milk.”

Then the governor said: “She had a daughter, but it is dead.”

“We have a test for that also—for our dead. The grave of one dead one year is one step long, of one dead two years, two steps long, and so on.”

They went to the church-yard and found not a single grave which stood their test.

Zönow-Owan said: “Bind leather bands about me. I will cry out.”

The truth was, they had dug a cellar for Mcher underground, and hid him there and watched over him.

The brothers bound Zönow-Owan about the body and he cried out. Mcher knew his voice and would have gone to him, but his grandmother said to him: “That is not the voice of thy kinsman. It is the noise of children and the beating of drums.”

When Mcher heard the voice for the third time he beat down the door and went out. One door destroyed the other. By a blow of his fist he sent the first door against the second, the second against the third, and so all seven doors were shattered.

Mcher saw his uncles from afar, but his father was not there. He asked, and his uncle told him the men of Chlat had slain his father. He fell upon his face and wept, and as he lay there his uncles wished to lift him, but exert themselves as they would they could not move him.

The tears of Mcher furrowed the earth and flowed like a river. After three days he arose, mounted his father’s horse, and rode to Chlat. He circled the town and destroyed it—as it is even to this day. Then he ascended the mountain Memrut and saw the smoke of the ruins grow ever denser. Only one old woman remained alive. He seized her, and, bending two trees down, bound her feet to the trees and let them loose. And thus he killed her. Since then no smoke ascends from Chlat.