drunk, and I was glad to get a breath of fresh
air.

"There is nobody here," said Ananyev when we went out. "Why are you
telling stories, Azorka? You fool!"

There was not a soul in sight.

"The fool," Azorka, a black house-dog, probably conscious of his
guilt in barking for nothing and anxious to propitiate us, approached
us, diffidently wagging his tail. The engineer bent down and touched
him between his ears.

"Why are you barking for nothing, creature?" he said in the tone
in which good-natured people talk to children and dogs. "Have you
had a bad dream or what? Here, doctor, let me commend to your
attention," he said, turning to me, "a wonderfully nervous subject!
Would you believe it, he can't endure solitude--he is always
having terrible dreams and suffering from nightmares; and when you
shout at him he has something like an attack of hysterics."

"Yes, a dog of refined feelings," the student chimed in.

Azorka must have understood that the conversation was concerning
him. He turned his head upwards and grinned plaintively, as though
to say, "Yes, at times I suffer unbearably, but please excuse it!"

It was an August night, there were stars, but it was dark. Owing
to the fact that I had never in my life been in such exceptional
surroundings, as I had chanced to come into now, the starry night
seemed to me gloomy, inhospitable, and darker than it was in reality.
I was on a railway line which was still in process of construction.
The high, half-finished embankment, the mounds of sand, clay, and
rubble, the holes, the wheel-barrows standing here and there, the
flat tops of the mud huts in which the workmen lived--all this
muddle, coloured to one tint by the darkness, gave the earth a
strange, wild aspect that suggested the times of chaos. There was
so little order in all that lay before me that it was somehow strange
in the midst of the hideously excavated, grotesque-looking earth
to see the silhouettes of human beings and the slender telegraph
posts. Both spoiled the ensemble of the picture, and seemed to
belong to a different world. It was still, and the only sound came
from the telegraph wire droning its wearisome refrain somewhere
very high above our heads.

We climbed up on the embankment and from its height looked down
upon the earth. A hundred yards away where the pits, holes, and
mounds melted into the darkness of the night, a dim light was
twinkling. Beyond it gleamed another light, beyond that a