Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/104

opened my eyes. It was dark. But I felt I was falling down, down, down. I stretched out my hand to attach myself to something, but the rough wall scratched my fingers; it was running away from me, upward. I felt blood on my fingers. It was clear that all this was not merely a play of my sick imagination. But what was it? What?

I heard my own frequent, trembling breaths. (I am not ashamed to confess this, it was all unexpected and incomprehensible.) A minute, two, three passed; I was still going down. Then a soft bump. The thing that had been falling away from under my feet was motionless. I found in the darkness a knob, and turned it; a door opened; there was a dim light. I now noticed behind me a square platform, traveling upward. I tried to run back to it but it was too late. “I am cut off here,” I thought. Where “here” might be I did not know.

A corridor. A heavy silence. The small lamps on the vaulted ceiling resembled an endless, twinkling, dotted line. The corridor was similar to the “tube” of our underground railways but it was much narrower, and made not of our glass but of some other, very ancient material. For a moment I thought of the underground caves where they say many tried to save themselves during the Two Hundred Years’ War. There was nothing to do but to walk ahead.

I walked, I think, for about twenty minutes. A turn to the right, the corridor became wider, the small lamps brighter. There was a dim droning somewhere . . . Was it a machine or voices? I did not know. I stood before heavy, opaque door from behind which came the noise. I knocked. Then I knocked again, louder. Now there was silence behind the door. Something clanked; the door opened slowly and heavily.

I don’t know which of us was the more dumfounded; the thin, blade-like doctor stood before me!

“You here!” His scissors opened and remained open. And I, as if I did not know a human word, stood silent,