The defeat at Akhulgo did not turn away from Schamyl the hearts of his countrymen. On the contrary, now thrice delivered by Allah out of the hands of the infidels, he was regarded by them with the greater veneration. Though escaped with only his life and his arms, when he appeared in the aouls of Itchkeria, a territory lying north of the Andian branch of the Koissu, the mountaineers received him as a prophet come directly from God, and mounting their horses followed him. The news of his coming ran before him through all the highlands; the warriors half drew their shaskas at hearing it; the chieftains of the Tchetchenians who had received the cross of St. George from the Russians, tore it from their breasts; and the bards striking with a frenzy of inspiration their lyres, chanted the miraculous deliverance and great deeds of this successor of Mahomet. Thus going from aoul to aoul preaching faith in Allah and war against his enemies, sending out also disciples to visit in his name the remoter districts, threatening death to all who held with the Russians, here driving away flocks and herds, and there taking hostages, he in a few months succeeded in rallying around his standards great numbers of the Tchetchenians, of the Lesghians, and of the various tribes of Daghestan. Disgusted by the treatment he received at the hands of the Russians, as was also the case with most of the highland tribes who had recently been obliged to submit their necks to the yoke of bondage, even his old enemy Hadji-Murad came over to the side of the Imam, bringing the greater part of Avaria with him. The spirit of fanatic war swept over the whole eastern Caucasus like a tempest; and those tribes, like the Salatanians, who from the nearness of their position to the Russian line were obliged nominally to acknowledge the supremacy of the czar, burned in their hearts to join again the standard of revolt. His head-quarters Schamyl now established in Dargo, an aoul consisting of about seventy houses, and situated some fifty miles northwest from Akhulgo, in that part of Tchetchenia inhabited by the Itchkerians. Though an open aoul, Dargo was sufficiently protected by the mountains and the thick forests which everywhere covered them; for here the primeval woods had never been disturbed by the axe of any pioneers of civilization. The oaks stretched out against the sky their twisted branches crowned with the glory of two centuries; the beeches with their innumerable leaves spread out a wider shade than those which in Italy inspired the pastoral reed of Virgil; the round-topped elms towered high above the gracefully pointed birches, and the trembling poplars; while below in many localities a vast variety of flower-bearing plants, vines, and creepers formed a tangled web as beautiful to the eye and fragrant to the sense as to the feet impenetrable.