"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[24] and he himself will look down from up yonder through his glass."
"But doesn't he live a long way off?"
"Not a long way off. Here, at your left, about ten versts he will be."
"How do you know that?" I inquired. "Have you been there?"
"I've been there. All of us in the mountains have."
"And you have seen Shamyl?"
"Pikh! Shamyl is not to be seen by us. A hundred, three hundred, a thousand murids[25] surround him. Shamyl will be in the midst of them," he said with an expression of fawning servility.
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.