was horrified to find that the state he had been in during his first month in the Petropávlof Fortress had again returned. Again he felt the pain in the crown of his head, again he saw faces with enormous mouths, shaggy and terrible, on a dark background, speckled with little stars; and again forms appeared before his open eyes. There was only this new about it: he saw a criminal with shaved head and grey trousers swinging before him, and by a sequence of ideas he began to look for a ventilator to which he could attach a rope. Intolerable hatred that demanded expression, burned in Mezhenétsky’s heart. He could not lie still, could not grow calm, and could not get rid of his thoughts.
“How?” he began to ask himself. “By cutting an artery? I might not succeed. … Hanging? … Of course! That’s the simplest!” He remembered that he had seen a bundle of logs tied together by a cord in the corridor. “Get up on the logs, or on a stool? … The watchman is pacing up and down the corridor, but he will fall asleep or go away. … I shall have to wait, and then take the rope and fasten it to the ventilator.”
Standing at his door, Mezhenétsky listened to the watchman’s steps, and now and then, when the latter was at the far end of the corridor, he looked out through the chink. But the watchman did not go away nor fall asleep, and still Mezhenétsky listened eagerly to the sound of his footsteps, and waited.
At the same time, in the cell where the sick old man lay in complete darkness but for a smoky lamp, amid the sleepy sounds of night—breathing, groaning, snoring, coughing—the greatest of life’s events was taking place. The old sectarian was dying; and to his spiritual vision was revealed all that he had so desired during his whole life. In the midst of dazzling light he saw the Lamb in the shape of a radiant youth, and a great multitude of people of all nations standing before him clothed in white; and they all rejoiced that there was no more evil on earth. All this was happening in his own soul and in the whole world, as the old man knew, and he was filled with a great joy and peace.