"How often I looked back, and thought--as all I loved grew further off--that a man's first duty is to those who cannot live without him. Moreover, that I should be punished for casting eyes upon and longing for stirring rather than steadfast life. Badly begun, and sadly ended, was to be the rule of it. At the outset thus our little band (familiar as they once had been with every twist of the mountain-chain and every tangle of the gorges) had managed, by living in peace so long, to get their memories confused. And even when they hit upon the way, they found it stopped by Cossack outposts at the very points that we used to guard. But after many a climb and crawl, we contrived to rejoin the brave Imaum.
"I was admitted to him at once, and saw by the weariness of his eyes, and the looseness of his attitude, that he knew it was all over. He was sitting at a table with the lamp behind him, and his shaggy head thrown backward, so that the light played down the furrows of his heavy forehead, as from below one sees the moon glistening down a wrinkled steep. With his usual scorn of ceremony he did not rise, but grasped my hand.
"'Imar, thou art a man,' he said, with his guttural voice, such as all the Avars have, now a little tremulous. 'If all had been as true as thou, I should not look like this to-night. It is Russian gold that has conquered us. To-morrow I surrender.'
"This was such a shock to me, that I could not reply immediately. Not that I cared for the cause of Islam, to which he had been devoted; neither did I detest the Russians, or dream that we, with so many races all at feud with one another, could ever form a nation. But I felt as any true man would feel, a reverence for this dauntless hero (who had held his own so long against resistless odds) and sorrow at the close of a career so grand.
"'I have fought a good fight. I have held the faith. I have not striven for my own glory, but in the cause of God most High. If it is His Holy will to forsake us, there is no more for man to do.'
"It was useless of course to argue with him. A man at all open to argument would not have done much against Russia. And when I met my few surviving friends among his gallant officers, they told me that his last defence was gone, his force reduced to four hundred men, and all his inaccessible retreats cut off. The enemy had blocked him in his last hole; for his own life he cared little, as he had proved a thousand times; but the few who still remained faithful to him, and were ready to die at his side, surely it would have been a mean requital to drive them like sheep into the butcher's yard. Therefore must he yield at last.