THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

However savage the campaigns [in Chechnia], where sharpshooters lurked behind every tree, and Russian losses were terrible, the land itself was not hostile. There were trees, gras, streams; it was a world they knew. Dying there, the men still felt themselves among friends. Not so in Daghestan, where nothing lived; where an endless labyrinth of precipices and phantasmagoric peaks formed an accursed desolation – a hell, which they had reached before death.

Gammer/Shamil