Watch fires, too, are often kept burning through the night; and in cold weather they serve likewise to keep warm those sleeping around them. When the fires are numerous they light up with picturesque effect the grim-faced rocks and the solemn woods. A whole mountain side even may be illuminated by the multitude of flames, making the granite, porphyry, and limestone glow with colors more gorgeous than those borrowed from the light of day. Or the gloom of the deep glen is dissipated and devoured by the lambent tongues of fire, while the rocks over against each other burn with the additional radiance reflected from their faces. Beacon answers to beacon from cliffs and hilltops. Perhaps the enemy's fires far off diffuse a glow through another quarter of the heavens. The reeds of the Kuban and the Terek set on fire by the Russians to destroy the ambuscades of the mountaineers, touch with a dull red tint the low northern horizon; here and there conflagrations raging in the grass-grown steppes show at night where lie the vast and dreary confines of the Muscovite; while perhaps the moon sinking below the Black mountains draws, with a line of silver, the broken outline of their ridges, leaving in the blackness of midnight the vast forests and outcropping rocks below.
When the first faint blush of breaking day suffuses the eastern sky far off above the Caspian, the warrior's eye already open is straining to catch it. His tent is struck; his horse saddled; his arms girded on; and he ready for the march. As the gray dawn deepening to crimson fills the mountains ere the sun be risen with its increasing, all-pervading light, the horsemen descend in small parties from the already purple heights into the mists which hang their thin veils over the depths of the valleys. Their arms reflect the beams of the risen sun, and the red or purple in their caps is heightened by the glow of the mountain tops. Gaily they gallop down the easy declivities, their horses snuffing eagerly the fresh air of the morning, but their ragged banners too wet with the dews of night to flaunt upon the zephyrs that, newly risen, scarcely move their wings. The foremost riders, gaining the open valley screened by an intervening mountain from the plain of the enemy, prance over it, and companies of horse coming in from different directions join the general rendezvous until, all counted, they may amount to two or three hundred, or as many thousand men. For seldom does a Circassian chief lead on a raid into the enemy's country with either less than the former number or more than the latter.