Is it possible that people find no room to live together in this beautiful world, under this boundless starry heaven? Is it possible that amid this bewitching nature, the soul of man can harbor the sentiments of hatred and revenge, or the passion for inflicting destruction upon his kind? All ugly feelings in the heart of man ought, it would seem, to vanish away in this intercourse with nature,--with this immediate expression of beauty and goodness! [Footnote 17: The frogs in the Caucasus make a sound entirely different from the _Kvakan'yé_ of the Russian frogs.] [Footnote 18: German mispronunciation for _Antichrist,_ the accent of which in Russian falls on the penult.] 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[19] 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. 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.[20] 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. "Tell me, please, what are those fires," I asked in a whisper of the Tatar riding at my side. "Don't you really know?" was his reply. "No," said I. "That is mountain straw tied to a pole,[21] and the light is waved." "What for?" "So that every man may know the Russian is coming. Now in the Auls," he added with a smile, "_aï, aï_ the _tomásha_[22] are flying about; every sort of _khurda-murda_[23] will be hurried into the ravines." "How do they know so soon in the mountains that the expedition is coming?" I asked. "_Eï!_ How can they help knowing? It's known everywhere: that's the kind of people we are." "And so Shamyl is now getting ready to march out?" I asked.