It was an August night, there were stars, but it was dark.  Owing to the fact that I had never in my life been in such exceptional surroundings, as I had chanced to come into now, the starry night seemed to me gloomy, inhospitable, and darker than it was in reality.  I was on a railway line which was still in process of construction.  The high, half-finished embankment, the mounds of sand, clay, and rubble, the holes, the wheel-barrows standing here and there, the flat tops of the mud huts in which the workmen lived—­all this muddle, coloured to one tint by the darkness, gave the earth a strange, wild aspect that suggested the times of chaos.  There was so little order in all that lay before me that it was somehow strange in the midst of the hideously excavated, grotesque-looking earth to see the silhouettes of human beings and the slender telegraph posts.  Both spoiled the ensemble of the picture, and seemed to belong to a different world.  It was still, and the only sound came from the telegraph wire droning its wearisome refrain somewhere very high above our heads.

We climbed up on the embankment and from its height looked down upon the earth.  A hundred yards away where the pits, holes, and mounds melted into the darkness of the night, a dim light was twinkling.  Beyond it gleamed another light, beyond that a third, then a hundred paces away two red eyes glowed side by side—­ probably the windows of some hut—­and a long series of such lights, growing continually closer and dimmer, stretched along the line to the very horizon, then turned in a semicircle to the left and disappeared in the darkness of the distance.  The lights were motionless.  There seemed to be something in common between them and the stillness of the night and the disconsolate song of the telegraph wire.  It seemed as though some weighty secret were buried under the embankment and only the lights, the night, and the wires knew of it.

“How glorious, O Lord!” sighed Ananyev; “such space and beauty that one can’t tear oneself away!  And what an embankment!  It’s not an embankment, my dear fellow, but a regular Mont Blanc.  It’s costing millions. . . .”

Going into ecstasies over the lights and the embankment that was costing millions, intoxicated by the wine and his sentimental mood, the engineer slapped Von Schtenberg on the shoulder and went on in a jocose tone: 

“Well, Mihail Mihailitch, lost in reveries?  No doubt it is pleasant to look at the work of one’s own hands, eh?  Last year this very spot was bare steppe, not a sight of human life, and now look:  life . . . civilisation. . .  And how splendid it all is, upon my soul!  You and I are building a railway, and after we are gone, in another century or two, good men will build a factory, a school, a hospital, and things will begin to move!  Eh!”

The student stood motionless with his hands thrust in his pockets, and did not take his eyes off the lights.  He was not listening to the engineer, but was thinking, and was apparently in the mood in which one does not want to speak or to listen.  After a prolonged silence he turned to me and said quietly: