It was not an easy matter at any time, with over a hundred foul fellow-sleepers above and all around one. The sighs, the coughs, the groans, the stertorous snortings and snorings, the restless movements which travelled spasmodically along the packed sleeping-benches from whatever spot they started till they stopped on the pachyderm carcase of some heavier sleeper than usual, the quarrels, the cursings, the jingle and clink of fetters, the poisonous, ammoniacal smells of all those foul bodies, the sickening heat, the insects and vermin--truly, to any man accustomed to the simple virtues of cleanliness of body and mind, sleep in such a place was not a matter of easy accomplishment, and Palma's short, descriptive word was amply earned. Yet at times Pavlof had found sleep not impossible. But that night it was very far beyond him. He lay awake and with his eyes wide open, too, in spite of the pungency of the atmosphere which weighed on his eyelids like coins on the eyes of the dead, and set his eyeballs smarting. And, though the mirk and reek, and the heavy darkness, and the thick log walls of the kazarm cut short his bodily vision, the white soul of him looked past these and caught glimpses of visions of another kind, and in the sight of them he smiled. Now, when a convict on the great Siberian road smiles to himself in his kamera of a night, he is half-brother to the saints or joint tenant with a madman, and the madman, I am inclined to think, has the pleasanter time of it. CHAPTER VI HOW THE WHITE SEEDS GREW As Pavlof had expected, the following day saw them on the road. Palma and he, as political prisoners, had the right to travel in a bumping teléga. They both gave up their places in favour of less capable travellers--Palma yielding his to an ailing wife who was following her husband into exile, and Pavlof dividing his among some of the bigger children, whose mothers had failed to convince the convoy officer that they were under twelve. Whatever their ages, their small feet soon tired of the road, and they showed their thanks to the tall man with the pleasant lean face--whose eyes still smiled at them even when the day's march was drawing to a close--by shy offerings of the wild flowers they had gathered during their perambulatory spells. Their road lay up hill and down dale, through fine rolling country--mighty stretches of prairie land gemmed with flowers, dense forests of birch and poplar with evergreens clustering thick below, and now and again wide fields of corn still green in the ear, and, at long intervals, straggling villages of weather-beaten log houses where the women gave the children food. The children, indeed, had much the best of it, even when they had to walk all the way and grew very tired before the resting-place was reached. For they carried no burdens, visible or invisible, and, of all that the grown folks carried, the burdens that were not seen were the heaviest.