How we swept the land of Kisliar, continued the Circassian captain; how we baffled the foe beneath the towers of Dargo; how Schamyl the Immortal did prodigies of valour at Unsorilla and destroyed the army of Count Woronzoff, the Governor of New Russia, one hundred and fifty thousand in number, whose bones yet lie in the forest of Itzkeri; how we fought with desperation, neither asking nor giving quarter, and how we hurled the Russians from the slopes of the Caucasus back upon the shores of the Kuban, where they lay unburied save by the jaws of the wolf and eagle, torn and disembowelled by hungry dogs, all Europe knows full well; and how successive armies, full of barbarous pride and military and religious enthusiasm, horsemen, artillery, and infantry--hussars and Cossacks, Kurds and Tartar hordes, who had stooped their necks to Russia's iron yoke, entered the valleys of Circassia, valleys which seem but dark chasms or fissures where the branches of the Koissons roar and leap from rock to rock in northern Daghestan, and there they perished, too, beneath the bullet and the arrow, the spear and sling of the unconquerable Tcherkesses. It was my brother Selim who slew General Woinoff; it was Karolyi who stormed the redoubts and spiked his cannon: and it was I who hewed off the head of the gallant soldier Passek, and bore it for three days on my spear. In this year of the Christians, 1840, I commanded that portion of the Circassian troops which besieged the Russians in the fort of Mikhailov. They defended themselves with the blind fury of men who foresaw their doom was death! Selim pressed them with three thousand men on one side; Karolyi, with the same number, pressed them on the other; while I, with a chosen band of four thousand archers, slingers, and musketeers, plied them from every quarter with incessant missiles. Selim cut off the sluices which supplied them with water, and Karolyi stormed their outworks, tore down their stockades, and beheaded every defender whom they caught by the lasso. But Heaven has put much valour into the hearts of these infidels; hence, though reduced to the verge of starvation (having picked the bones of their last horse, and stewed their boot-tops and leather shakoes), their commander, Ivan Carlovitch, colonel of the Tenginski Hussars, resolved to make one gallant effort to escape, for his soldiers had with them several old standards, which the Russians regard as almost holy. His garrison was composed of the 37th or Tenginski Grenadiers; the 38th or Novoginski Regiment, which carried the famous banner of St. George, the same that had been with their predecessors at the passage of the Alps, and which waved on the field of Trebbia, where they fought under Suvaroff. He had also two battalions of the Imperial Guard, whose tattered and shot-riven standards had waved on many a bloody plain, and been clenched in the dying grasp of many a gallant man.