Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/57

stance, they broke and fell. The green trees were scorched, their sap slowly ran out and they remained standing like black crosses, like skeletons. Then appeared Prometheus

(that meant us):

The world was renovated; it became like steel—a sun of steel, trees of steel, men of steel. Suddenly an insane man “unchained the fire and set it free,” and again the world had perished. . . . Unfortunately I have a bad memory for poetry, but one thing I am sure of: one could not choose more instructive or more beautiful parables.

Another slow, heavy gesture of the cast-iron hand and another poet appeared on the steps of the Cube. I stood up. Impossible! But thick Negro lips—it was he. Why didn’t he tell me that he was to be invested with such high . . . His lips trembled; they were gray. Oh, I certainly understood; to be face to face with the Well-Doer, face to face with the hosts of Guardians! Yet one should not allow oneself to be so upset.

Swift, sharp verses like an ax. . . . They told about an unheard-of crime, about sacrilegious poems in which the Well-Doer was called. . . . But no, I do not dare to repeat. . . .

R-13 was pale when he finished, and looking at no one (I did not expect such bashfulness of him) he descended and sat down. For an infinitesimal fraction of a second I saw right beside him somebody’s face—a sharp, black triangle—and instantly I lost it; my eyes, thousands of eyes, were directed upward toward the Machine. Then—again the superhuman, cast-iron, gesture of the hand.

Swayed by an unknown wind, the criminal moved; one step . . . one more . . . then the last step in his life. His