On the fifth day of Hadji Murad’s stay in Tiflis Loris- Melikov, the Viceroy’s aide-de-camp, came to see him at the latter’s command.

“My head and my hands are glad to serve the Sirdar,” said Hadji Murad with his usual diplomatic expression, bowing his head and putting his hands to his chest. “Command me!” said he, looking amiably into Loris-Melikov’s face.

Loris-Melikov sat down in an arm chair placed by the table and Hadji Murad sank onto a low divan opposite and, resting his hands on his knees, bowed his head and listened attentively to what the other said to him.

Loris-Melikov, who spoke Tartar fluently, told him that though the prince knew about his past life, he yet wanted to hear the whole story from himself.

Tell it me, and I will write it down and translate it into Russian and the prince will send it to the Emperor.”

Hadji Murad remained silent for a while (he never interrupted anyone but always waited to see whether his interlocutor had not something more to say), then he raised his head, shook back his cap, and smiled the peculiar childlike smile that had captivated Marya Vasilevna.

“I can do that,” said he, evidently flattered by the thought that his story would be read by the Emperor.

“Thou must tell me” (in Tartar nobody is addressed as “you”) “everything, deliberately from the beginning,” said Loris Melikov drawing a notebook from his pocket.

“I can do that, only there is much — very much — to tell! Many events have happened!” said Hadji Murad.

“If thou canst not do it all in one day thou wilt finish it another time,” said Loris-Melikov.

“Shall I begin at the beginning?”

“Yes, at the very beginning . . . where thou wast born and where thou didst live.”

Hadji Murad’s head sank and he sat in that position for a long time. Then he took a stick that lay beside the divan, drew a little knife with an ivory gold-inlaid handle, sharp as a razor, from under his dagger, and started whittling the stick with it and speaking at the same time.

“Write: Born in Tselmess, a small aoul, ‘the size of an ass’s head,’ as we in the mountains say,” he began. “not far from it, about two cannon-shots, lies Khunzakh where the Khans lived. Our family was closely connected with them.

“My mother, when my eldest brother Osman was born, nursed the eldest Khan, Abu Nutsal Khan. Then she nursed the second son of the Khan, Umma Khan, and reared him; but Akhmet my second brother died, and when I was born and the Khansha bore Bulach Khan, my mother would not go as wet-nurse again. My father ordered her to, but she would not. She said: ‘I should again kill my own son, and I will not go.’ Then my father, who was passionate, struck her with a dagger and would have killed her had they not rescued her from him. So she did not give me up, and later on she composed a song . . . but I need not tell that.”

“Yes, you must tell everything. It is necessary,” said Loris-Melikov.

Hadji Murad grew thoughtful. He remembered how his mother had laid him to sleep beside her under a fur coat on the roof of the saklya, and he had asked her to show him the place in her side where the scar of her wound was still visible.

He repeated the song, which he remembered:

“My white bosom was pierced by the blade of bright steel,

But I laid my bright sun, my dear boy, close upon it

Till his body was bathed in the stream of my blood.

And the wound healed without aid of herbs or of grass.

As I feared not death, so my boy will ne’er fear it.”

“My mother is now in Shamil’s hands,” he added, “and she must be rescued.”

He remembered the fountain below the hill, when holding on to his mother’s sarovary (loose Turkish trousers) he had gone with her for water. He remembered how she had shaved his head for the first time, and how the reflection of his round bluish head in the shining brass vessel that hung on the wall had astonished him. He remembered a lean dog that had licked his face. He remembered the strange smell of the lepeshki (a kind of flat cake) his mother had given him — a smell of smoke and of sour milk. He remembered how his mother had carried him in a basket on her back to visit his grandfather at the farmstead. He remembered his wrinkled grandfather with his grey hairs, and how he had hammered silver with his sinewy hands.

“Well, so my mother did not go as nurse,” he said with a jerk of his head, “and the Khansha took another nurse but still remained fond of my mother, and my mother used to take us children to the Khansha’s palace, and we played with her children and she was fond of us.

“There were three young Khans: Abu Nutsal Khan my brother Osman’s foster-brother; Umma Khan my own sworn brother; and Bulach Khan the youngest — whom Shamil threw over the precipice. But that happened later.

“I was about sixteen when murids began to visit the aouls. They beat the stones with wooden scimitars and cried ‘Mussulmans, Ghazavat!’ The Chechens all went over to Muridism and the Avars began to go over too. I was then living in the palace like a brother of the Khans. I could do as I liked, and I became rich. I had horses and weapons and money. I lived for pleasure and had no care, and we............