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No less than sixty populous aouls of the Kabardians were plundered; twenty Cossack stanitzas were destroyed; and ravaging on either side the lands through which he passed, the Imam seriously threatened the strong places of Mosdok, Jekaderinograd, and Stavropol.
He rehearses not only the legendary ballads to the listening circle of men and children, but conveys in song from tribe to tribe the chronicle of recent events, and the latest intelligence of the doings of the common enemy. His numbers describe how in some late foray the warriors, leaping down from the rocks, scattered the flax-haired Muscovites, and pillaged the stanitzas of the Cossacks.
In all haste the women and children fly to the fort; the soldiers drive in the swine or cattle which feed on the grass around it; the sentinels fire the cannon to give the alarm to the neighboring stanitzas; and every Cossack within sound of the signal-firing, vaulting into the saddle and putting his steed to his mettle, hastens lance in hand to drive back the enemy.
It was easy galloping over the smooth valleys and softly rolling hills of the Kabardas; nor having once broken the bounds of the mountains were Schamyl's riders content to turn back their horses until they had watered them on the Kuban, and even filled with consternation the stanitzas on the still more distant banks of the Laba.
Schamyl rode down the Cossacks, plundered the stanitzas, and left behind the forts which were not carried amid the whirlwind of his first coming.
Schamyl, surveying the posture of affairs in the spring of 1846, with the eye of a warrior who was at the same time a prophet, saw that the concentration of Russian troops was mostly in the fortresses of Temir-Chan-Chura and Grosnaja; that Woronzoff was busy looking after his kreposts and his stanitzas; and that consequently there was an opening for himself by means of fast galloping to break through the enemy's line, and make a raid in the Kabardas.
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