time, when it was necessary to go to sleep, but now he began to be
aware of its mysterious and uncanny nature. In order not to believe in
death, it was necessary to hear and see and feel ordinary things about
him, footsteps, voices, light, the soup of sour cabbage. But in the
dark everything was unnatural; the silence and the darkness were in
themselves something like death.

And the longer the night dragged the more dreadful it became. With the
ignorant innocence of a child or a savage, who believe everything
possible, Yanson felt like crying to the sun: "Shine!" He begged, he
implored that the sun should shine, but the night drew its long, dark
hours remorselessly over the earth, and there was no power that could
hasten its course. And this impossibility, arising for the first time
before the weak consciousness of Yanson, filled him with terror. Still
not daring to realize it clearly, he already felt the inevitability of
approaching death, and felt himself making the first step upon the
gallows, with benumbed feet.

Day quieted him, but night again filled him with fear, and so it was
until one night when he realized fully that death was inevitable, that
it would come in three days at dawn with the sunrise.

He had never thought of what death was, and it had no image to him-but
now he realized clearly, he saw, he felt that it had entered his cell
and was looking for him, groping about with its hands. And to save
himself, he began to run wildly about the room.

But the cell was so small that it seemed that its corners were not
sharp but dull, and that all of them were pushing him into the center
of the room. And there was nothing behind which to hide. And the door