feel towards Christ as they do towards a woman who they know has betrayed them, played them false, but they are used to her—insensible to others and cannot give her up. Anyhow—there is no God. Had there been one—would people be as they are? Although I certainly didn’t say these last words to him. I believe it is the first time that I have ever uttered them. They, too, are naïve and clumsy. No, I can’t write.

I was talking not so much to him as examining my own self, scrutinizing my opinions on God, religion and all this sentiment of the poor in spirit. He sat on a bench by the window, watching me, leaning against the table, now and then laughing with the inoffensive laughter of an innocent. So we sat until we finally fell asleep, I on the bed, he on the floor.

I woke up in the night and found him standing in the middle of the room, so tall that he almost reached the ceiling, muttering as he glanced out of the window and pointed to me:

“Help him, you must help him!” He murmured this sternly, as though issuing a command, as though conscious of his power over someone—this little performance was somehow not to my taste, but I said nothing to the queer creature and went back to sleep again. And then I had a dream. I was walking along the horizon on the edge of a flat circle, covered by the vault of a grayish sky, feeling something cold and hard under my fingers—that was the edge of the sky. It had grown into, stuck to a soundless earth as harsh as iron—my own steps did not echo on it. As a dim mirror the sky reflected my body, hideously distorted, my face grimacing, my hands trembling and my reflection stretched out these trembling hands to me, with curiously stiff, unbending fingers. I had already gone several times round the empty circle, moving more and more rapidly along the horizon—but I could not make out what it was I was searching for and I could not stop. I felt utterly miserable and distressed: I could remember that there was life on earth, people living on it—where was it all? In an unbreakable silence, a complete lifelessness, my movement round the circle grew more and more rapid, now it was like the flight of a swallow and side by side flew my gesticulating reflection, and it was there, wherever I turned. The circle drew in, grew smaller, the vault of the sky descended on me, I ran, I suffocated, I screamed.…

The man woke me up and I, in my terror, was so glad to be awake that I seized him by the hands, and jumped about, laughing. I behaved very foolishly, in fact. But I can remember nothing more terrible than that dream. By the way—it is wrong to say that only the unfathomable is terrible. Astronomy, for instance, is quite simple, but is it any less terrible?

Noise and shooting go on in the town. I have no cigarettes—that is sad.

I worked with enthusiasm, lived in a state of elation. I liked to have people under my orders probably more than most people like it, particularly intellectuals, who are fond of ordering about but do not know how to do it. No matter what anyone may say, power over men gives one a great satisfaction. To compel a man to think and behave as you want does not at all mean to hide behind him, no, it has a value in itself, as the expression of your own personal ascendance, your own importance. It inspires admiration.…And had I not loved power, I would not have been considered as a remarkable organizer.

When I was arrested for the first time, I felt like a hero and went to face the questioning as one goes to fight a bear singlehanded. I am not an expert in suffering and have never gone through much of it in prisons, barring, of course, the usual discomforts of prison life. No freedom? Prison gave me the freedom to read and learn. Apart from that, prison gives a revolutionary something equal to a general’s rank, surrounds him with a halo, and one should know how to avail oneself of this when one has to do with people whom one is pushing against their will towards freedom.

The servant of my class enemies, the colonel of the gendarmerie, turned out to be a good-natured, red- nosed, corpulent man, probably a drunkard. He welcomed me with a smile and words which I did not expect, indeed, from an enemy.

“Peter Karazin, alias Karamora? Oho, you’re a fine fellow. You’d make an excellent dragoon.”