My father Mostapha was a chief; the head of one of those princely houses which are of Kabardian descent; his will was a law to his people; and the booty he took in his wars with the fierce Tartars and faithless Muscovites was the reward of their fidelity. We were Christians once--many ages ago--but it pleased God to open our eyes to the blessed precepts of Islam, and now we turn our faces to the Kaaba when we pray. Many nobles followed the banner of my father, whose territories extended along the base of the mountain steppes, from Marinskoi to the banks of the Kisselbash River; but one night, in the year 1807, the Russian General Goudivitch, with ten thousand cavalry, burst among us; stormed Anapa, and gave our men to the sword, our roofs to the flames, and our children to the wolf and the eagle.
My father fought long and nobly; the war was desperate; the Russians impaled their prisoners, and my father roasted his; but the tide of battle turned against us. All our possessions became a prey to the Russ, and our most beautiful damsels were given as wives or handmaidens to those brutal Cossacks, whom the merciless Goudivitch had brought from the banks of the Don. Azrael spread his dusky wings over our beautiful country; all the land was burned up, and black as night--being waste as a garden whose fruits have been gathered.
Then the new chain of forts was built along the Kuban. These marked the extended boundary of the Russian territory, and the land of my father was lost for ever; his bones lay unburied, where he had fallen, sword in hand, on the threshold of his own door, pierced by the same bayonets that slew his faithful wife; and their three children, myself and two brothers, sole heirs to his hopes and his harvest of vengeance, received the bread of charity from another Circassian tribe, the friendly Abassians, who dwell between the mountains and the Euxine.
Time rolled on, and from tending the flocks of the Abassians as shepherd boys, my brothers Selim and Karolyi grew strong and hardy men. The Abassians told us of our father's fate, and we longed to avenge it, and to recover our lost patrimony. Day after day we spent our time in acquiring the perfect use of arms, in talking of our hopes, our projects, and desires; and often we looked with kindling eyes towards those mountains, from whose summits the Muscovite outposts were visible by the waters of the Kuban; for dear as war and vengeance are the honour of his race and country to the proud and free Tcherkesse.