"This something was the more horrible since it had no definite shape. Something bulky, dark, yellowish-black, spotted like a lizard's belly, not a storm-cloud, and not smoke, was crawling with a snakelike motion over the earth. A wide rhythmic undulating movement from above downwards, and from below upwards, an undulation recalling the malignant sweep of the wings of a vulture seeking its prey; at times an indescribably revolting grovelling on the earth, as of a spider stooping over its captured fly.... Who are you, what are you, menacing mass? Under its influence I saw it, I felt it--all sank into nothingness, all was dumb.... A putrefying, pestilential chill came from it. At this chill breath the heart turned sick and the eyes grew dim, and the hair stood up on the head. It was a power moving; that power which there is no resisting, to which all is subject, which, sightless, shapeless, senseless, sees all, knows all, and like a bird of prey, picks out its victims, stifles them and stabs them with its frozen sting." This passage, by the intensity of horror it evokes, shows how deeply entwined in the roots of Turgenev's joy in life was his loathing of death; and the same note is struck with cumulative force in "The End of the World" and "The Insect," where the chill atmosphere of frozen terror and suffocating dread is enforced by the gloomy imagery. There can be no doubt that Turgenev's premonitory obsession of death in his last years was one of the manifestations of the malignant disease of which he died--cancer of the spinal marrow--which cast the darkening shadow of melancholy over his vital energies and intensified his sensation of spiritual isolation. In the struggle between his healthy instincts and the weariness and dejection diffused by this creeping, malignant cancer, his latter days may be likened to those of an autumnal landscape at evening, with the valleys shivering in the shadows of approaching night, while the higher ground remains still flushed with warm light. But the _Poems in Prose_, his last work, declare how comparatively little the morbid processes at work within his frame had impaired his serene intelligence, his wide unflinching vision, his deep generous heart, and passion to help others. This, although he had already written, "I have grown old, all seems tarnished around me and within me. The light which rays from the heart, showing life in its colour, in relief, in movement, this light is nearly extinguished within me: it flickers under the crust of cinders which grows thicker and thicker." But his cruel malady in the last two years, when Turgenev endured "all that one can endure without dying," did not embitter his character.[28] Pavlovsky tells us: