iet, and safe."

CHAPTER X

What Maryan had told Kranitski about Darvid was true. The man was
engaged in real orgies of labor. His assistants and associates
were bending beneath it, and losing breath; he seemed more
untiring than ever: Counsels, meetings, accounts, balances,
correspondence, discussions with functionaries of the government,
of finance, and of industries, banks, bureaus, exchanges,
auctions, etc. And in all this appeared order, sequence,
punctuality, logic, lending to the course of these gigantic
interests the seeming of a machine with multitudes of wheels
moved by a force elemental, invincible. For even those who had
known him longest and most intimately, Darvid had become this
time a surprise; he had surpassed himself. The number of men was
continually increasing who began to look on him as on a rare
phenomenon of nature. Whence did the man get such uncommon mental
and physical vigor? From mid-day till hours which were far beyond
midnight he was unceasingly active. When has he time to sleep and
take rest? What is he seeking to reach? What will he reach? This
last question brought out before the imagination of men certain
summits of financial might, to be reared to such dizzy heights
for the first time in the history of the country. A giant of
mentality and energy. Some said: He is superhuman.

But in the immense number of men connected with Darvid by a net
of most varied relations there were some to whom he seemed a
curious enigma, representing a certain inveterate struggle, the
motives of which rested on the mysterious bases of his being.
That hurling of himself with greater force than at any time
hitherto into the whirl of occupations and business; that
exertion to the remotest limits of the possible, directed toward
one object of thought and energy, seemed to penetrating eyes, not
merely a thirst for acquisition and profit, but a desperate
conflict with something undiscovered and invisible. At that
moment of his life it seemed to some that Darvid was like a man
running straight forward and with all his might, because he felt
that were he to halt, something awful would seize him. Others
said, that he called to mind a man into whose ear some buzzing
insect had crept, and who was hiding in a factory filled with
uproar which was to drown the unendurable buzzing of the insect.

The truth was, that Darvid was building at that time, and with
iron labor, a wall between himself and the giantess who