fairly roomy. However,
although one could stand upright in it, the place had a sepulchral
aspect.

The old man raised his lamp, whose tiny gleam lit up for a moment the
black walls discoloured by stains of yellowish rust. Here it was almost
dry and the light of the lamp revealed no moisture. Little irregular
heaps of ore dotted the ground. However, there was one damp corner, and
in it grew thickly together a little group of mushrooms with little flat
hoods of a sickly white colour on stalks which were also white and very
slender. The old man took care of them and avoided covering them with
any of the earth which he dug out. One day he had even brought to this
corner a piece of turf in the midst of which were some field-flowers.
But neither the buttercups nor the daisies consented to live without
the sun; they gradually died, fading away by stages like consumptives
who are deprived of the sun and of its warmth. Only one little flower
had a tougher life than the rest and held out a long time, although it
completely lost its colour in the eternal darkness of this tomb. Ivan
watched it with curiosity until it also hung its head over its
desiccated stalk. Then he had nothing left but the mushrooms and a kind
of greyish lichen which spotted the rock at intervals.

To-day old Ivan was very tired; he sat down on a heap of ore, placed his
little lamp in a niche of the rock, which was already blackened with
smoke, and buried his head in his hands. Not a single echo reached this
spot. A melancholy silence reigned in this vault, but the old man was
accustomed to it. He for whom the darkness was peopled by mysterious
apparitions vanishing as soon as they appeared, heard also strange
voices down here. Sometimes it was like the fragment of an incomplete
song or a distant call which pierced the silence. At other times, when
his pickaxe penetrated deeply the heart of the rock, he fancied he heard
a stifled sigh as if the tool had pierced the breast of a living
creature. All these vague sounds seemed to him full of significance.
Having nothing in common with the world of reality, he lived in fancies
and dreams.

Sometimes, after making sure that he had a supply of matches, he put out
his lamp, lay on his back on the ground and fixed his wide-open eyes on
the darkness. Then it seemed to him that the walls of his black prison
expanded indefinitely. The vaulted roof overhead rose to a prodigious
height, and he felt himself for the first