“If you expect to make me betray my comrades, through fear or for profit, you are judging me by yourselves. Can you possibly imagine that when doing what you are now trying me for, I was not prepared for the worst? So you cannot surprise or frighten me by anything you do; you can do to me what you like, but I shall not speak.”

He was pleased to see how, quite abashed, they glanced at one another.

In the Petropávlof Fortress he was put into a small damp cell with a window high up in the wall, and he knew that it was not for months, but for years, and was seized with terror at the well-ordered, dead silence and by the consciousness that he was not alone, but that behind these impenetrable walls were other prisoners, sentenced to ten or twenty years’ confinement, committing suicide, being hanged, going out of their minds, or slowly dying of consumption. Here were men and women and friends, perhaps.⁠ ⁠… “Years will pass, and I too shall lose my reason, hang myself, or die. And no one will ever hear of it,” he thought.