The Invaders and other Stories

VII.

We had now been marching more than two hours. I began to feel chilly, and to be overcome with drowsiness. In the darkness the same indistinct objects dimly appeared: at a little distance, the same black shadow, the same moving spots. Beside me was the crupper of a white horse, which switched his tail and swung his hind-legs in wide curves. I could see a back in a white Circassian shirt, against which was outlined a carbine in its black case, and the handle of a pistol in an embroidered holster: the glow of a cigarette casting a gleam on a reddish mustache, a fur collar, and a hand in a chamois-skin glove.

I leaned over my horse's neck, closed my eyes, and lost myself for a few minutes: then suddenly the regular hoof-beat and rustling came into my consciousness again. I looked around, and it seemed to me as though I were standing still in one spot, and that the black shadow in front of me was moving down upon me; or else that the shadow stood still, and I was rapidly riding down upon it.

Suddenly, a little in advance of us, from out the darkness flashed a number of lights; at the same instant, with a ping some bullets whizzed by, and from out the silence that surrounded us from afar arose the heavy, overmastering roar of the guns. This was the vanguard of the enemy's pickets. The Tatars, of which it was composed, set up their war-cry, shot at random, and fled in all directions.

Looking up in the air, it was possible to make out that the sky which had become clear again was lighter in the east, and the Pleiades were sinking down into the horizon. But in the gulch through which we were passing, it was humid and dark.

Every thing became silent again. The general summoned his interpreter. The Tatar in a white Circassian dress hastened up to him, and the two held a rather long conversation in a sort of whisper and with many gestures.

At one such moment I was more strongly than ever impressed by that incessantly approaching sound, the cause of which I could not fathom: it was the roar of water. We were passing though a deep gulch, and coming close to a mountain river, which at that season was in full flood. The roaring became louder, the damp grass grew taller and thicker, bushes were encountered in denser clumps, and the horizon narrowed itself down to closer limits. Now and then, in different places in the dark hollows of the mountains, bright fires flashed out and were immediately extinguished.

"What for?"

"That is mountain straw tied to a pole, and the light is waved."

"Tell me, please, what are those fires," I asked in a whisper of the Tatar riding at my side.

"So that every man may know the Russian is coming. Now in the Auls," he added with a smile, "aï, aï the tomásha are flying about; every sort of khurda-murda will be hurried into the ravines."

"Not a long way off. Here, at your left, about ten versts he will be."

"No," said I.

"I've been there. All of us in the mountains have."

"How do you know that?" I inquired. "Have you been there?"

"How do they know so soon in the mountains that the expedition is coming?" I asked.

"Don't you really know?" was his reply.

"Colonel Khasánof! give orders to scatter the enemy," said the general in a low, deliberate, but distinct tone of voice.

"But doesn't he live a long way off?"

"And you have seen Shamyl?"

"And so Shamyl is now getting ready to march out?" I asked.

"Yok (no)," he replied, shaking his head as a sign of negation, "Shamyl will not march out. Shamyl will send his naïbs and he himself will look down from up yonder through his glass."

"Pikh! Shamyl is not to be seen by us. A hundred, three hundred, a thousand murids surround him. Shamyl will be in the midst of them," he said with an expression of fawning servility.

"Eï! How can they help knowing? It's known everywhere: that's the kind of people we are."

The division went down to the river. The black mountains stood back from the pass; it was beginning to grow light. The arch of heaven, in which the pale, lustreless stars were barely visible, seemed to come closer; the dawn began to glow brightly in the east; a cool, penetrating breeze sprang up from the west, and a bright mist like steam arose from the foaming river.