to Nulato, to shudder at mere dying. But he objected to the torture. It
offended his soul. And this offence, in turn, was not due to the mere
pain he must endure, but to the sorry spectacle the pain would make of
him. He knew that he would pray, and beg, and entreat, even as Big Ivan
and the others that had gone before. This would not be nice. To pass
out bravely and cleanly, with a smile and a jest--ah! that would have
been the way. But to lose control, to have his soul upset by the pangs
of the flesh, to screech and gibber like an ape, to become the veriest
beast--ah, that was what was so terrible.

There had been no chance to escape. From the beginning, when he dreamed
the fiery dream of Poland's independence, he had become a puppet in the
hands of Fate. From the beginning, at Warsaw, at St. Petersburg, in the
Siberian mines, in Kamtchatka, on the crazy boats of the fur-thieves,
Fate had been driving him to this end. Without doubt, in the foundations
of the world was graved this end for him--for him, who was so fine and
sensitive, whose nerves scarcely sheltered under his skin, who was a
dreamer, and a poet, and an artist. Before he was dreamed of, it had
been determined that the quivering bundle of sensitiveness that
constituted him should be doomed to live in raw and howling savagery, and
to die in this far land of night, in this dark place beyond the last
boundaries of the world.

He sighed. So that thing before him was Big Ivan--Big Ivan the giant,
the man without nerves, the man of iron, the Cossack turned freebooter of
the seas, who was as phlegmatic as an ox, with a nervous system so low
that what was pain to ordinary men was scarcely a tickle to him. Well,
well, trust these Nulato Indians to find Big Ivan's nerves and trace them
to the roots of his quivering soul. They were certainly doing it. It
was inconceivable that a man could suffer so much and yet live. Big Ivan