the infinite time during which a
body would continue sinking through dense, chilly bulk until sight
faded and the heart stopped beating. Yes, before my mind's eye there
arose men drowned and devoured by crayfish, men with crumbling skulls
and swollen features, and glassy, bulging eyes and puffy hands and
outstretched fingers and palms of which the skin had rotted off with
the damp.

The first to fall in was Mokei Budirin. He had been walking next ahead
of the Morduine, and, as a man habitually silent and absorbed,
proceeding on his way more quietly than the rest. Suddenly something
had seemed to catch at his legs, and he had disappeared until only his
head and his hands, as the latter clutched at his plank, had been left
above-level.

"Run and help him, somebody!" was Ossip's instant cry. "Yes, but not
all of you--just one or two. Help him I say!"

The spluttering Mokei, however, said to the Morduine and myself:

"No; do you move away, mates, for I shall best help myself. Never you
mind."

And, sure enough, he did succeed in drawing himself out on to the ice
without assistance. Whereafter he remarked as he shook himself:

"A nice pickle, this, to be in! I might as well have been drowned!"

And, in fact, at the moment he looked, with his chattering teeth and
great tongue licking a dripping moustache, precisely like a large,
good-natured dog.

Then I remembered how, a month earlier, he had accidentally driven the
blade of his axe through the joint of his left thumb, and, merely
picking up the white fragment of flesh with the nail turning blue, and
scanning it with his unfathomable eyes, had remarked, as though it was
he himself that had been at fault:

"How often before I have injured that thumb, I could not say. And when
once I dislocated it, I went on working with it longer than was right....
Now I will go and bury it."

With which, carefully wrapping up the fragment in some shavings, he had
thrust the whole into his pocket, and bandaged the wounded hand.

Similarly, after that, did Boev, the man next in order behind Mokei,
contrive to wrest himself from the grasp of the ice, though, on
immersion, he started bawling, "Mates, I shall drown! I am dead
already! Help me, help me!" and became so cramped with terror as to be
extricated only with great difficulty, while amid the general confusion
the Morduine too nearly slipped into the water.

"A narrow shave of saying Vespers tonight with the devils in Hell!"