choked, began to cough and while coughing, thought: "How strange it is
that I am coughing."

"Am I losing my reason?" thought Sergey, growing cold. "Am I coming to
that, too? The devil take them!"

He rubbed his forehead with his hand, and this also seemed strange to
him. And then he remained breathless, motionless, petrified for hours,
suppressing every thought, all loud breathing, all motion,-for every
thought seemed to him but madness, every motion-madness. Time was no
more; it appeared transformed into space, airless and transparent,
into an enormous square upon which all were there-the earth and life
and people. He saw all that at one glance, all to the very end, to the
mysterious abyss- Death. And he was tortured not by the fact that
Death was visible, but that both Life and Death were visible at the
same time. The curtain which through eternity has hidden the mystery
of life and the mystery of death was pushed aside by a sacrilegious
hand, and the mysteries ceased to be mysteries-yet they remained
incomprehensible, like the Truth written in a foreign tongue. There
were no conceptions in his human mind, no words in his human language
that could define what he saw. And the words "I am afraid" were
uttered by him only because there were no other words, because no
other conceptions existed, nor could other conceptions exist which
would grasp this new, un-human condition. Thus would it be with a man
if, while remaining within the bounds of human reason, experience and
feelings, he were suddenly to see God Himself. He would see Him but
would not understand, even though he knew that it was God, and he
would tremble with inconceivable sufferings of incomprehension.

"There is Mueller for you!" he suddenly uttered loudly, with extreme