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 indifference on his face that on seeing him I forgot that I was in a hostile aoul , and felt quite at home.