All viewed with dismay his usually impassive countenance, distorted and changed by the traces of some past inward agony. After an interval of profound silence, he directed the nearest Murids to bring his mother into his presence, and when she had arrived, he thus addressed the people: “The will of the Prophet of Allah be done! People of Dargo, the Tchetchenes have dared to think of yielding to the Giaour, and have even ventured to send messengers, hoping for my consent. The messengers, conscious of their sin, dared not appear before my face, but have tempted the weakness of my unhappy mother to be their mediator. For her sake, I have ventured, aided by your prayers, to ask the will of Mohammed the Prophet of Allah; and that will is, that the first who spoke to me of this matter shall be punished with a hundred blows of the heavy whip. It was my mother!” With these words, Schamyl signed to his Murids, who seized the venerable old Khaness, and bound her to one of the pillars of the mosque. At the fifth blow, she sank dead. Schamyl, with a wild outburst of grief, threw himself at her feet; but suddenly rising again, cried solemnly--“God is great, and Mohammed is his prophet! he hath heard my prayer, and I may take upon myself the remainder of my mother’s expiation!” With that, stripping off his upper garments, he commanded the Murids to inflict the remaining ninety-five blows upon his own back. The punishment fulfilled, Schamyl gave orders that the envoys of the Tchetchenes, terror-stricken witnesses of the preceding scene, should be brought into his presence. The ready Murids half drew their schaskas; but Schamyl, raising the men of Gunoi from the ground on which they had cast themselves in an agony of fear, said only, in his calm, impassive way, “Go back to your people; and for my answer, tell them what you have seen to-day.” Schamyl is simple and abstemious in the extreme in his personal habits. Contenting himself with a few hours’ sleep, he sometimes spends night after night in prayer and watching without showing the least symptoms of weariness. Not yet sixty, he is full of life and vigor; though at present he takes an active share in the war only rarely, and on great occasions. He lives in Dargo, where he has caused the enemy’s deserters to build him a two-storied house in the Russian fashion, and is said to have three wives, the chief of whom is an Armenian of great beauty.