Crossword-Solution: AOUL 4 letters, 4 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 4

Where the _aoul_ had stood was an empty space; his mother not there, nor his brothers, nor his house; one tree alone was left standing.

Languages spoken by only twelve or fifteen settlements are comparatively common; and in South-western Daghestan there is an isolated village of less than fifty houses--the aoul of Innookh--which has a dialect of its own not spoken or understood, so far as has yet been ascertained, by any other portion of the whole Caucasian population.

You may hear to-day in almost any Caucasian aoul didactic fables from the Sanscrit of the _Hitopadesa_, anecdotes from the _Gulistan_ of the Persian poet Saadi, old jokes from the Grecian jest-book of Hierocles, and humorous exaggerations which you would feel certain must have originated west of the Mississippi River.

The place of his birth is Himri, an aoul or village in the district of Arrakan, and in the north-western part of Daghestan, a territory lying on the Caspian.

Himri, accordingly, together with the neighboring fortified aoul of Akhulgo, is one of the keys of this triangular region of well-watered highlands, which is inhabited by a considerable number of warlike tribes known collectively as the Lesghians, and which, with the territory of Daghestan on the east, and that of Tchetchenia on the north, is the principal theatre of the great military achievements of Schamyl.