And he really did go away.  Here are the walls, here is the little window in the door, here is our prison, but he is not there; he has gone away.  Consequently I, too, could go away.  Instead of having wasted dozens of years on a titanic struggle, instead of being tormented by the throes of despair, instead of growing enfeebled by horror in the face of unsolved mysteries, of striving to subject the world to my mind and my will, I could have climbed the table and—­one instant of pain—­I would be free; I would be triumphant over the lock and the walls, over truth and falsehood, over joys and sufferings.  I will not say that I had not thought of suicide before as a means of escaping from our prison, but now for the first time it appeared before me in all its attractiveness.  In a fit of base faint-heartedness, which I shall not conceal from my reader, even as I do not conceal from him my good qualities; perhaps even in a fit of temporary insanity I momentarily forgot all I knew about our prison and its great purpose.  I forgot—­I am ashamed to say—­ even the great formula of the iron grate, which I conceived and mastered with such difficulty, and I prepared a noose made of my towel for the purpose of strangling myself.  But at the last moment, when all was ready, and it was but necessary to push away the taburet, I asked myself, with my habit of reasoning which did not forsake me even at that time:  But where am I going?  The answer was:  I am going to death.  But what is death?  And the answer was:  I do not know.

These brief reflections were enough for me to come to myself, and with a bitter laugh at my cowardice I removed the fatal noose from my neck.  Just as I had been ready to sob for grief a minute before, so now I laughed—­I laughed like a madman, realising that another trap, placed before me by derisive fate, had so brilliantly been evaded by me.  Oh, how many traps there are in the life of man!  Like a cunning fisherman, fate catches him now with the alluring bait of some truth, now with the hairy little worm of dark falsehood, now with the phantom of life, now with the phantom of death.

My dear young man, my fascinating fool, my charming silly fellow—­who told you that our prison ends here, that from one prison you did not fall into another prison, from which it will hardly be possible for you to run away?  You were too hasty, my friend, you forgot to ask me something else—­I would have told it to you.  I would have told you that omnipotent law reigns over that which you call non-existence and death just as it reigns over that which you call life and existence.  Only the fools, dying, believe that they have made an end of themselves —­they have ended but one form of themselves, in order to assume another form immediately.

Thus I reflected, laughing at the foolish suicide, the ridiculous destroyer of the fetters of eternity.  And this is what I said addressing myself to my two silent roommates hanging motionlessly on the white wall of my cell: