ss
expanse of the atmosphere--could have heard them laughing in their
flight.

At night the street grew quiet in the lonely light of the large,
electric sun. And then, the enormous fortress, within whose walls there
was not a single light, passed into darkness and silence, separating
itself from the ever living, stirring city by a wall of silence,
motionlessness and darkness. Then it was that the strokes of the clock
became audible. A strange melody, foreign to earth, was slowly and
mournfully born and died out up in the heights. It was born again;
deceiving the ear, it rang plaintively and softly--it broke off--and
rang again. Like large, transparent, glassy drops, hours and minutes
descended from an unknown height into a metallic, softly resounding
bell.

This was the only sound that reached the cells, by day and night,
where the condemned remained in solitary confinement. Through the roof,
through the thickness of the stone walls, it penetrated, stirring the
silence--it passed unnoticed, to return again, also unnoticed. Sometimes
they awaited it in despair, living from one sound to the next, trusting
the silence no longer. Only important criminals were sent to this
prison. There were special rules there, stern, grim and severe, like the
corner of the fortress wall, and if there be nobility in cruelty, then
the dull, dead, solemnly mute silence, which caught the slightest rustle
and breathing, was noble.

And in this solemn silence, broken by the mournful tolling of the
departing minutes, separated from all that lives, five human beings,
two women and three men, waited for the advent of night, of dawn and the
execution, and all of them prepared for it, each in his or her own way.

CHAPTER VII THERE IS NO DEATH

Just as Tanya Kovalchuk had thought all her life only of others and
never of herself, so now she suffered and grieved painfully, but
only for her comrades. She pictured death, only as awaiting them, as
something tormenting only to Sergey Golovin, to Musya, to the others--as
for herself, it did not concern her.

As a recompense for her firmness and restraint in the courtroom she wept
for long hours, as old women who have experienced great misery, or as
very sympathetic and kind-hearted young people know how to weep. And
the fear that perhaps Seryozha was without tobacco or Werner without the
strong tea to which he was accustomed, in addition to the fact that
they were to die, caused her no less pai