Hadji Murád by Leo Tolstoy (best mobile ebook reader .txt) 📕

“We have bullets and powder; everything shall be ready,” replied Gamzálo, and roared out something incomprehensible. He understood why Hadji Murád had ordered the rifles to be loaded. From the first he had desired only one thing⁠—to slay and stab as many Russians as possible, and to escape to the hills; and this desire had increased day by day. Now at last he saw that Hadji Murád also wanted this, and he was satisfied.

When Hadji Murád went away, Gamzálo roused his comrades, and all four spent the rest of the night examining their rifles, pistols, flints, and accoutrements; replacing what was damaged, sprinkling fresh powder onto the pans, and stoppering packets filled with powder measured for each charge with bullets wrapped in oiled rags, sharpening their swords and daggers and greasing the blades with tallow.

Before daybreak Hadji Murád again came out into the hall to get water for his ablutions. The songs of the nightingales that had burst into ecstasy at dawn were now even louder and more incessant than they had done before, while from his henchmen’s room, where the daggers were being sharpened, came the regular screech and rasp of iron against stone.

Hadji Murád got himself some water from a tub, and was already at his own door when, above the sound of the grinding, he heard from his murids’ room the high tones of Khanéfi’s voice singing a familiar song. He stopped to listen. The song told of how a dzhigít, Hamzád, with his brave followers captured a herd of white horses from the Russians, and how a Russian prince followed him beyond the Térek and surrounded him with an army as large as a forest; and then the song went on to tell how Hamzád killed the horses, and, with his men entrenched behind this gory bulwark, fought the Russians as long as they had bullets in their rifles, daggers in their belts, and blood in their veins. But before he died Hamzád saw some birds flying in the sky and cried to them:

“Fly on, ye winged ones, fly to our homes!
Tell ye our mothers, tell ye our sisters,
Tell the white maidens, that fighting we died
For Ghazavát! Tell them our bodies
Never will lie and rest in a tomb!
Wolves will devour and tear them to pieces,
Ravens and vultures will pluck out our eyes.”

With that the song ended, and at the last words, sung to a mournful air, the merry Bata’s vigorous voice joined in with a loud shout of “Lya-il-lyakha-il Allakh!” finishing with a shrill shriek. Then all was quiet again, except for the tchut, tchut, tchut, tchut and whistling of the nightingales from the garden, and from behind the door the even grinding, and now and then the whizz, of iron sliding quickly along the whetstone.

Hadji Murád was so full of thought that he did not notice how he tilted his jug till the water began to pour out. He shook his head at himself, and re-entered his room. After performing his morning ablutions he examined his weapons and sat down on his bed. There was nothing more for him to do. To be allowed to ride out, he would have to get permission from the officer in charge; but it was not yet daylight and the officer was still asleep.

Khanéfi’s song reminded him of the song, the one his mother had composed just after he was born⁠—the song addressed to his father, that Hadji Murád had repeated to Lóris-Mélikov.

“Thy sword of Damascus-steel tore my white bosom;
But close on it laid I my own little boy;
In my hot-streaming blood him I laved; and the wound
Without herbs or specifics was soon fully healed.
As I, facing death, remained fearless, so he,
My boy, my dzhigit, from all fear shall be free!”

He remembered how his mother put him to sleep beside her under a cloak, on the roof of their sáklya, and how he asked her to let him see the place on her side where the wound had left a scar. Hadji Murád seemed to see his mother before him⁠—not wrinkled and grey-haired, with gaps between her teeth, as he had lately left her, but young, handsome, and so strong that she carried him in a basket on her back across the mountains to her father’s when he was a heavy five-year-old boy. He also recalled his grandfather, wrinkled and grey-bearded, and how the old man hammered silver with his sinewy hands, and made him say his prayers.

He thought of the fountain at the foot of the hill, whither, holding to her wide trousers, he went with his mother to fetch water. He remembered the lean dog that used to lick his face, and he recalled with special vividness the peculiar smell of sour milk and smoke in the shed where his mother took him with her when she went to milk the cows or scald the milk. He remembered how she shaved his head for the first time, and how surprised he was to see his round blue-gleaming head reflected in the brightly-polished brass basin that hung against the wall.

And the recollection of himself as a little child reminded him of his beloved son, Yusúf, whose head he himself had shaved for the first time; and now this Yusúf was a handsome young dzhigít. He pictured him as he was when last he saw him. It was on the day Hadji Murád left Tselméss. His son brought him his horse and asked to be allowed to accompany him. Yusúf was ready dressed and armed, and led his own horse by the bridle. His rosy handsome young face and the whole of his tall slender figure (he was taller than his father) breathed of daring, youth, and the joy of life. The breadth of his shoulders, though he was so young, the very side youthful hips, the long slender waist, the strength of