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Updated: June 3, 2025
They were his very best troops, including a part of the celebrated regiment "Count Paskievitsch," and with them he pressed forward with such rapidity towards Buturnay, and then attacked it with such impetuosity, that Schamyl was obliged at once to relinquish all hope of making a stand there.
But while Akhulgo was the place where Schamyl had resolved to make a final stand for the liberty of the mountains, there were other points also where he proposed to stop, if possible, the march of the invaders.
There was no stopping; and before the garrisons along the line knew that Schamyl had come, he was gone; and when the Kabardians believed that the braggart who had threatened their land with plundering was shut up in his mountains six hundred wersts away, he was in their midst.
Finally, a system of military punishments was introduced, comprising various fines, imprisonment, and death. For a revenue Schamyl does not depend, like his predecessors, on the fifth of the booty taken from the enemy, and the fines imposed for violations of the scharyat, but has introduced a regular system of taxation.
Two rivers flowed between the mountain ranges and the Kabardas, and two lines of hostile fortresses guarded the frontier, containing in all no less than seventy thousand men. Between the forts lay Cossack settlements, and beyond them the Kabardians, an armed and warlike race. Schamyl had no artillery, no fortresses, no dépôts of provisions and ammunition.
Schamyl was thirty-seven years of age when he was raised to the rank of a murschid and leader of the tribes. At that period in his prime, he had outgrown the early delicacy of his constitution, and was a warrior as distinguished in personal appearance as in character and intellectual culture.
Occasionally in the autumnal months a party of huntsmen is made up for an excursion into the high Caucasus. Such expeditions constitute a memorable event in the life of the deli-kan; and it may well be believed that Schamyl must have embraced the opportunity thereby offered of beholding the grandeur of nature amidst "the thousand peaks." There would be but little need of preparation.
Schamyl in early youth exhibited a remarkable sensibility to the beauty and sublimity of nature. It is related of him by the aged men of Himri that he was fond of climbing the neighboring mountains, and that especially at the going down of the sun he might be seen sitting on a high point of rock whence he could survey at the same time the vale below and the fantastic summits which tower above it.
We have said that the most instructive part of Herr Bodenstedt's essay is his sketch of that politico-religious scheme which made Schamyl formidable to the Russians. This system, it is to be observed, arose and has since been fully developed only in the Eastern Caucasus, where of late the main stress of the war has been.
Of this first warrior-priest of Daghestan, Schamyl was the favorite disciple and the most trusted soldier. Kasi-Mullah was not killed until Schamyl had already fallen as it seemed, under several deadly wounds: his reappearance after this bloody scene was but the first of many similar escapes, the report of which sounds like a fable.
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