Our troops had taken possession of the village, and not a single soul of the enemy remained in it, when the General and his suite, with which I had mingled, rode up to it.
The long, clean huts, with their flat earthen roofs and shapely chimneys, stood on irregular stony mounds, between which flowed a small stream.
On one side you saw green gardens with enormous pear and plum trees, brightly lit up by the sun; on the other, strange upright shadows, and the perpendicular stones of the cemetery, and long poles, with balls and many coloured flags attached to their ends. (These marked the graves of the dzhigits .)
The troops were drawn up outside the gates.
A moment later, dragoons, Cossacks, and infantry spread with evident joy through the crooked lanes, and in an instant the empty village was animated again. There crashed a roof: an axe rings against the hard wood of a door that is being forced open: here a stack of hay, a fence, a hut, is set on fire, and a pillar of thick smoke rises up in the clear air. Here is a Cossack dragging along a sack of flour and a carpet; there a soldier, with a delighted look on his face, brings a tin basin and some rag out of a hut; another with outstretched arms is trying to catch two hens that are struggling and cackling beside a fence: a third has somewhere discovered an enormous pot of milk and, after drinking some of it, throws the rest on to the ground amid loud laughter.
The battalion with which I had come from Fort N⸺ was also in the aoul . The Captain sat on the roof of a hut and sent thin whiffs of cheap tobacco smoke through his short pipe, with such an expression of