Legend tells that the twin summits of Elbrus, a 5,642-meter (18,510-foot) colossus at the Russian-Georgian border, are the cleaved skull of an ancient giant.

Elbrus, the tale goes, was attacked by his son Mount Beshtau in an argument over a local beauty, Mount Mashuk. Her tears now form one of southern Russia's most celebrated mineral springs.

The exotic story captures the real life complexity of the Caucasus -- and the way fallings out here quickly turn bloody.

Today the world's focus is on Russia's attack against Georgia in response to a Georgian assault on a separatist enclave of ethnic-Ossetians.

But the Ossetians are just one of more than 50 tiny ethnic groups in this beautiful region, each speaking a separate language, each fiercely protective of ancestral lands.

"The Caucasus has the typical complications of a mountain region, where people from different ethnicities live in isolation from each other," says Alexander Cherkasov, an expert on the region with the Memorial human rights group.

The amazing ethnic patchwork of Papua New Guinea and the clan system of highland Scotland bear similarities, Cherkasov points out.

Add the post-Soviet legacy of corruption, brutality, and floods of weaponry, and you have the Caucasus.

Other than the fighting over South Ossetia in Georgia, there are bloody conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, the Georgian separatist province of Abkhazia, and the quagmire of Chechnya, where an estimated 100,000 people have lost their lives in a failed independence bid from Russia.

And yet Caucasian peoples are often able to live in harmony.

Despite today's horrors, many Georgians and Ossetians are related through marriage. In Abkhazia, where thousands have died since the 1990s, the ethnic-Abkhaz separatist leader himself is married to a Georgian.

Even Dagestan, a remarkable district on the Russian side of the mountains, with more than 30 distinct ethnic groups, has little history of inter-communal fighting.The trouble, analysts say, comes when outsiders deliberately stir the pot.

Russians have long been masters at this, strengthening their dominance by setting different ethnic groups against each other, said Sergei Arutunov, a researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

"Every empire from the Romans on has marched under the idea of 'divide and conquer,'" he said. "That's how it's been here and always will be."

In the 19th century, the tsars used an alliance with the strategically placed Ossetians to derail anti-Russian resistance leader Imam Shamil's attempts to unite the northern Caucasus tribes.

The main Ossetian town, which controls two key mountain passes between Russia and Georgia, was named Vladikavkaz -- literally "ruler of the Caucasus."

Stalin took the divide and rule concept to extremes, splitting related groups into different administrative districts and using forced resettlement to transform the ethnic balance.

Decades on, the effects of Stalin's machinations keep tearing at the Caucasus, whether in the Abkhaz struggle for independence to the south, or a vicious dispute between Ossetians and their Ingush neighbors to the north.

And Grigory Shvedov, editor of Caucasian Knot, a specialist Internet site, says the Kremlin still relies on divide and rule, regardless of the subsequent suffering.

But he also blames local leaders, like Georgia's first president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, an ultra-nationalist who in the early 1990s fueled hatred between Georgians and their Ossetian and Abkhaz neighbors, with disastrous results.

"These are conflicts were started artificially, rather than based on real ethnic feelings," Shvedov said. "Politicians play a big role in stirring this up."

Arutunov said the dangers of nationalism are well understood in the Caucasus, but that young hotheads are easily seduced by the rhetoric.

"I hope the wise will prevail," Arutunov said. "They must. Otherwise they will all slaughter each other and the Caucasus will end up a desert."