“This is bewildering,” he muttered.  “How the darkness baffles a man.  For the first time in my life I appreciate to the full the benediction of God’s command, ‘Let there be light.’”

He stood perplexed for a few moments, and, deeply thinking, his hands automatically performed an operation as the servants of habit.  They took from his pocket his cigarette case, selected a tube of tobacco, placed it between his lips, searched another pocket, brought out a match-box, and struck a light.  The striking of the match startled Lermontoff as if it had been an explosion; then he laughed, holding the match above his head, and there at his feet saw the loaf of black bread.  It seemed as if somebody had twisted the room end for end.  The door was where he thought the stream was, and thus he learned that sound gives no indication of direction to a man blindfolded.  The match began to wane, and feverishly he lit his cigarette.

“Why didn’t I think of the matches, and oh! what a pity I failed to fill my pockets with them that night of the Professor’s dinner party!  To think that matches are selling at this moment in Sweden two hundred and fifty for a halfpenny!”

Guided by the spark at the end of his cigarette, he sought the bench and sat down upon it.  He was surprised to find himself so little depressed as was actually the case.  He did not feel in the least disheartened.  Something was going to happen on his behalf; of that he was quite certain.  It was perfectly ridiculous that even in Russia a loyal subject, who had never done any illegal act in his life, a nobleman of the empire, and a friend of the Czar, should be incarcerated for long without trial, and even without accusation.  He had no enemies that he knew of, and many friends, and yet he experienced a vague uneasiness when be remembered that his own course of life had been such that he would not be missed by his friends.  For more than a year he had been in England, at sea, and in America, so much absorbed in his researches that he had written no private letters worth speaking of, and if any friend were asked his whereabouts, he was likely to reply: 

“Oh, Lermontoff is in some German university town, or in England, or traveling elsewhere.  I haven’t seen him or heard of him for months.  Lost in a wilderness or in an experiment, perhaps.”

These unhappy meditations were interrupted by the clang of bolts.  He thought at first it was his own door that was being opened, but a moment later knew it was the door of the next cell up-stream.  The sound, of course, could not penetrate the extremely thick wall, but came through the aperture whose roof arched the watercourse.  From the voices he estimated that several prisoners were being put into one cell, and he wondered whether or not he cared for a companion.  It would all depend.  If fellow-prisoners hated each other, their enforced proximity might prove unpleasant.

“We are hungry,” he heard one say.  “Bring us food.”