It was in this mine that he grew and made his first experiments in walking; later on he began to explore, first the narrow passage where his mother worked at her daily task, then venturing into the other galleries of this subterranean kingdom. As his mind developed, a whole world of phantoms created by his imagination rose around him. All these masses of black earth with their blocks of metal, which had slumbered for centuries in the depths, seemed to him living beings, and all the mysterious muffled sounds which came one knew not whence, sounded in his ears like the groans of victims imprisoned by evil genii in gloomy caves. For him the water which filtered through the walls of the mine was a shower of tears, and that which trickled, yellow of tint, across the ore resembled flowing blood. The darkness was constantly traversed by vague and ever new apparitions, vanishing as soon as they appeared, which nevertheless left a trace of their passage on the child's impressionable mind. When a miner's song reached him, deadened by distance, it seemed to him to issue from the depths of the rocks. By dint of practice, his sense of hearing had acquired a fine subtlety, and sometimes putting his ear to the rugged walls, he listened with so much attention that he could catch the faintest unknown and inexplicable sounds. It was perhaps only the wrathful murmur of some imprisoned spring, but for Ivan it was the groan of a human being struggling in his dungeon. All the objects round him--the ore, the rocks, the water--were animated with a life visible and comprehensible to him alone. These things were not for him, simple parts of inanimate nature, but creatures with souls, full of life, similar to himself, watching and listening to him as he watched and listened to them. Later on he made friends with an old man. He was a miner of a somewhat sombre disposition, but his eyes always grew moist when the child ran towards him. He would lay his wrinkled hand, hard as iron, tenderly on the head of the little one, and, as he rested, tell him how one day our Lord Jesus Christ had descended to the depths of this subterranean kingdom, and since then remained there with the miners. "Jesus is in the midst of us, I tell you," the old man would say dreamily, peering intently into the darkness, as though his half-blind eyes could really distinguish the divine Saviour there. As long as he was a child, Ivan saw Him also, and seeing Him feared Him, because he knew that Jesus does not love evil deeds and dark thoughts. Jesus is everywhere at once; He has thousands of eyes at His disposal; He sees and knows the slightest movements of men's hearts.