"He is there.... Standing. Oh, listen! Do you hear?" Ivan leant forward, straining his ear to catch mysterious sounds. As a matter of fact distant and strange moanings were audible. Was it the complaint of a spring imprisoned in the rock? Was it the noise of a landslip? Or was it simply the sound made by a current of air passing through the fissures of the rock? "A terrible thing happened here. Blood has been shed, yes, yes, I remember," murmured the old man, talking to himself and glancing about him. "Yes, it is there. He struck him on the head with his pick. He killed his brother ... like Cain. This is where they buried him.... Here I am, Lord, here I am!" And he resumed his march. The chief miner who had heard him remembered a long-forgotten tragedy, that of two brothers who had quarrelled just here. The elder, goaded to fury by the jeers of the younger, had raised his pickaxe and struck his brother with the point. Without even uttering a cry, the latter had collapsed. He had been probably buried on the spot where he had fallen. VII However, the more they went on, the more alarmed the miners grew. Whither was the old man leading them? What would happen if they lost themselves in the labyrinth of these subterranean galleries, whose silence had not been disturbed for long years? The darkness itself seemed startled by the sight of this terrified crowd. The miners would have gladly halted, but what would happen then? To go back was to go to certain destruction. As long as they followed Ivan, they had a vague hope of some mysterious aid, reckoning on the unknown power which supported him and had restored to him for some hours a little of his former vigour for the deliverance of his comrades perhaps. Those who had no belief in this hesitated nevertheless to separate from the rest, knowing not what to do in this silence and darkness. If they had to die, they would die together. At any rate, they soon understood that they would have inevitably perished in the gallery which they had just left, for they had hardly been following the old man for an hour when a dull and prolonged sound was heard in the distance. Then it came nearer, as though it were pursuing them. Its last echo seemed to them quite close, behind the wall they were skirting at that moment. It was evident that the gallery where they worked, as well the one which they had just quitted, had both fallen in. If they had remained there, they would have shared the fate of those of their comrades whose hands and feet only were projecting from the mass of earth which covered them.