Explore "Hadji Murád" by Leo Tolstoy on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
At the advanced fort Vozvízhensk, situated some ten miles from the aoul in which Hadji Murád was spending the night, three soldiers and a noncommissioned officer left the fortifications and went beyond the Shahgirínsk Gate. The soldiers, dressed as Caucasian soldiers used to be in those days, wore sheepskin coats and caps, and boots that reached above their knees, and they carried their cloaks tightly rolled up and fastened across their shoulders. Shouldering arms, they first went some five hundred paces along the road, and then turned off it and went some twenty paces to the right -- the dead leaves rustling under their boots -- till they reached the blackened trunk of a broken plane tree, just visible through the darkness. There they stopped. It was at this plane tree that an ambush party was usually placed.
The bright stars, that had seemed to be running along the tree tops while the soldiers were walking through the forest, now stood still, shining brightly between the bare branches of the trees.