else. And that was not likely on the face of it.

Razumov thought: "I am being crushed--and I can't even run away."
Other men had somewhere a corner of the earth--some little house in
the provinces where they had a right to take their troubles. A material
refuge. He had nothing. He had not even a moral refuge--the refuge of
confidence. To whom could he go with this tale--in all this great, great
land?

Razumov stamped his foot--and under the soft carpet of snow felt the
hard ground of Russia, inanimate, cold, inert, like a sullen and tragic
mother hiding her face under a winding-sheet--his native soil!--his very
own--without a fireside, without a heart!

He cast his eyes upwards and stood amazed. The snow had ceased to fall,
and now, as if by a miracle, he saw above his head the clear black sky
of the northern winter, decorated with the sumptuous fires of the stars.
It was a canopy fit for the resplendent purity of the snows.

Razumov received an almost physical impression of endless space and of
countless millions.

He responded to it with the readiness of a Russian who is born to an
inheritance of space and numbers. Under the sumptuous immensity of the
sky, the snow covered the endless forests, the frozen rivers, the plains
of an immense country, obliterating the landmarks, the accidents of
the ground, levelling everything under its uniform whiteness, like a
monstrous blank page awaiting the record of an inconceivable history.
It covered the passive land with its lives of countless people like
Ziemianitch and its handful of agitators like this Haldin--murdering
foolishly.

It was a sort of sacred inertia. Razumov felt a respect for it. A
voice seemed to cry within him, "Don't touch it." It was a guarantee of
duration, of safety, while the travail of maturing destiny went on--a
work not of revolutions with their passionate levity of action and their
shifting impulses--but of peace. What it needed was not the conflicting
aspirations of a people, but a will strong and one: it wanted not the
babble of many voices, but a man--strong and one!

Razumov stood on the point of conversion. He was fascinated by its
approach, by its overpowering logic. For a train of thought is never
false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence, in
secret fears and half-formed ambitions, in the secret confidence
combined with a secret mistrust of ourselves, in the love of hope and
the dread of uncertain days.

In Russia