"Go there. I wish you no harm, believe me. The people are new-born and alive. Don't you believe me?" "Our small eyes can see much," I answered, "but is that when they see the truth?" "Look with all your might," he cried, "with all your heart, with all your soul! Did I tell you to believe? I told you to learn and know." We kissed and he went away. He walked lightly, like a youth of twenty, and as if some happiness awaited him. I became sad when I looked back at this bird flying away from me, Heaven knows where, to sing his song in new parts. My head was heavy; my thoughts raced like Little Russians at market in the early morning, sleepy, awkward, slow, and in no way able to make order. Everything became strangely confused. To my thoughts there was another's conclusion and to this other's conclusion my own beginning. It hurt me, yet it was funny, and I seemed all changed within. When I went away from Verkhatour, I asked where the road led to, and they answered to the Isetsky factory. That was where the old man had wanted me to go, but I took a side road; I did not wish to go there. I wanted to go to the villages and look around me. The people were gloomy and haughty and seemed to wish to speak with no one. They looked about cautiously, as if they were afraid some one would rob them. "Here are the God-creators," I said to myself, looking at some pock-marked peasants. "I will ask them where this road leads to." "To the Isetsky factory." "What is it? Do all roads lead to that factory?" I asked myself, and wandered through villages and woods, crawling like a beetle through the grass, and seeing the factory from a distance. It smoked, but it did not lure me. I felt as if I had lost half of myself and I did not understand what I wanted. I was unhappy. A gray, idle pain filled my soul and evil laughter and a great desire to insult everybody and myself arose in me. Suddenly, without noticing it myself, I made up my mind: "I'll enter the factory, damn it!" CHAPTER XXI I came into a filthy hell. In a hollow between mountains which were covered with stumps of felled trees, buildings arose on the earth, from the roofs of which tongues of flame shot forth. Tall chimney-stacks rose toward the sky, from which smoke and steam poured out, staining the earth with soot. There was a deafening noise of hammers, and a roar and a wild squeaking and creaking of saws shot through the smoke-laden air. Everywhere there was iron, wood, coal, smoke, steam, stench; and in this pit, filled with every kind of miscellaneous thing, men worked black as coal. "Thank you, old man," I said to myself, "you have sent me to a nice place."