It was nighttime in the train heading to Moscow. Sleep didn't come to me. Lying down on the upper berth in a stuffy compartment, I listened to the continuously tearing rumble of wheels and, even closer, the whispering talks of old women. They intoned about their hardships of buying sausage and imported clothes at far-flung shopping centers, of living with drunkard sons-in-law and a score of incorrigible illnesses, dragging on the lethargic conversation with self-same accounts as if merely to keep it alive. The dark compartment interior was periodically scanned by the pale side lights along the track. In their passing flare, two small children, a boy and a girl, could be seen on the lower berth across the aisle. Fully dressed, they hugged each other in their slumber like lonely lovers.

I pressed my chin on the pillow against the grimy window pane and looked at the bleak, almost unreadable scenery. Only the distant lamp-poles slowly rode back like some big greenish dandelions, spilling the seeds of light on the wretched contours of the huts, fences and trees of the lifeless villages and the endless waves of snow on the open plains. As I stared fixedly for awhile, my fancies began to mix up with the landscape: a black luminous dog ran alongside the cars and played with the train on the night's steppe. In my entranced view, it was the Hound of Baskerville or my great country itself gathered in this aborted beast of imagination to haunt me and to disturb my sleep. I watched the beast further as it transformed into the yawning map of the Soviet Union, tracing the dazzling gradients of her meridians and parallels and the shiny dots of her cities, and then as it turned back into the dog, who was chasing the train and barking soundlessly. After what seemed like several more hours of bustling with damp sheets, I collapsed through the veil of flashes and sounds and embraced a dream.

I stood at a wide, spotlessly white place where I could at the same time see myself from any given point. The place conveyed a feeling of an enclosed space, although I perceived that it was definitely not a room with a regular, walled, rectangular disposition. The absorbing white color of unseen screens prevented me from observing any structure to that place and bleached my sensations quite to a dead stop, as if I were locked in some impenetrable and fatal chamber within my brain. The floor was oblique and somehow irrelevant to the notion of three dimensional space and yet, being firmly grounded on it, I didn't experience any giddiness. If the walls were here, they didn't presuppose to hold any architectural purport but protected me from the blasting wind and black eternity outside.

In the center of the room (if I'm able to speak of such a thing, it’s because of a divination and not an empirical sense) was installed a huge, revolting machine tinted in khaki. In height it was nearly two times my size, and its bulk consisted of many conglomerated rounded prominences of unpalpable designation. It reminded me at one and the same time of an old-fashioned jukebox, a lathe, and a military device, welded together in a series of frightful mutations. When I came closer to it and groped cautiously over its slick armoured surface, I found on its side, which was previously unexposed, a small hatch that covered the riveted window with an acrylic painting of a black dog inside. The image seemed to be created by the machine itself on the likeness of a playing card. The appearance of the dog proved so familiar that my mouth gaped open. Then, I saw this card flicking to another. From that moment, they kept changing, and I instinctively persisted counting them in my mind. All pictures on the cards that followed construed the core of my most indelible impressions and memories. Therefore, I had only one rankling desire: to stop the machine before it implacably brought me to the limits of self-knowledge. But, there were no means at hand, not a button or lever, to bring under control this cruel progression, and with each new overturned card, a blunt nail of terror stung deeper into my being. Beyond the hundredth number there sprung an image of a cheery horned imp dancing on the lush sunlit lawn, though it vanished as abruptly as all others had. Ten more cards later, an effigy of a god sitting on the throne among rosy puffy clouds cleared -- a card which so struck me with its extraordinary force and magnificence that I thought the machine to halt there. But it still wasn’t the end of what I was doomed to behold, as the last card which emerged in the plastic eye of the machine was a dim portrait of a Byzantine basileus. Its subject suggested the unmitigated sensation of melancholy along with the innate quality of unprecedented power. The dark cogged hoop of the crown pressed the long yellow locks to his forehead; his serene and antique reddish face contrasted with the ponderous golden chain hanging on his chest over a dark green shirt also embroidered with gold flowers. Through the brushwork of this image, kind of diffuse and obsolete (sunk leaves under flowing water), Basileus’s vague features revealed my own face, yet, as if it had been divorced from me for eternity. The machine seemed to linger here for a thousandth of a second, and then a terrible blow smashed it into pieces, carrying me away with a rain of distorted images and scraps of mirrorring steel.

My suspended berth resembled the aftermath of a sea battle. The sheets were drowned in cold sweat and my body reposed on them like a marble fish. Rumbling and shadows. In the compartment everything looked the same. Only the children-lovers now changed their posture and slept apart, their backs to one another. The monotonous clashing rupture of wheels on the rail joints became more audible, and the whole carriage jolted while the night train went at full speed. As I gradually calmed down, penitent tears rushed from my eyes, and I asked bitterly how long will I have to wait until the next awakening?

I was crouching on all fours in a ghastly desert seeing nothing around me but small fragments of rock and a scorched loamy soil that resembled coagulated lymph. The jagged surface hurt my knees badly, and I decided to stand up as soon as I regained the capacity of deliberation. Luckily, I was wearing a pair of sturdy shoes and an elegant suit. What a pain it would be to tread here barefooted! It was presumably the crack of dawn, the space in front of me was irridescent with pinkish and bluish hues. The air was so thin and transparent that I hardly noticed my breathing. Out of curiosity, I turned my head backward to be startled by the "western" dome of this heaven -- it was of a deep gray color, pregnant with warmth and light. Entertaining no ideas about my location nor any particular plans of how to live further, I walked out at random and eventually stumbled upon a Greek portico. It turned up before me suddenly like a superimposed image, affording me the opportunity to scold myself for my habit of watching the ground as I walk. There I recognized at once a bald man dressed in a white tunic; it was, of course, Socrates. He was pacing back and forth, like a lion submerged in insanity, waving his arms and talking profusely about the natural harmony of this world. I could understand his speech clearly; he was propounding some of his major ideas. For a moment, I reflected on his words and noted wistfully that he had been inspired by a wasteful illusion, because the reality of that world lay here as nothing else but a barren scorched desert.

But it was too great a challenge for me to contemplate in the presence of such a celebrated sage. I was soon totally degraded by his rigorous histrionics, though I could not help but notice a curious fact that the portico was missing a roof. The building was half-dilapidated and kept a decent look solely through the splendid activities of its dweller. I didn't fail to visualize the air of sublime vitality curling around the Doric columns, marking this place as a kind of rare oasis. Then, a surge of hilarious joy gripped me to the marrow. As if a street urchin by surreptitios coindidence facing a hero in the motley crowd, I was ready to rush to this man, embrace his knees, and even kiss the dust on his sandals. I would beg him to take me as a disciple and he, responding to my humble request, would nod for me to stay. . . Socrates, however, continued to ignore my presence, let alone the high state of excitement I was in. . . Yet I did not wish to restrain myself any longer. Plucking up all my courage and stretching forth my neck, I yelled at the top of my lungs the first thing that came into my mind: "Hey, Mister, where is your roof?!"

In a few seconds, something terrible happened. Socrates, with unfathomable agility, abandoned his asylum, menacingly hovered over my body, and, as I tried to protect myself by turning my back to him, he gave such a tremendous kick to my bottom that I flew a distance of thirty feet and crashed against bare rocks. I felt incredibly tortured. The entire front side of my body was burning, soaking in viscous liquid. Still, I endured the pain resolutely in the inner flashing darkness of my cranium and quelled the burst of surfacing tears. When at last I opened my eyes, I remained alone, wretchedly prone on the wicked face of that planet with only the muffled gray sky above like an upside-down wash basin. Perhaps Socrates was standing nearby and gazing at my disaster. I excluded no possibilities in the consideration of what was happening, including that of my death. I simply forgot about everything. I was undergoing a second birth in flesh and blood during my lifetime. I roamed away from this ill-fated place, knowing myself to be the most abandoned, abused and ashamed of all living creatures.

Later on there were many days spent in the wilderness: occasional meetings with the half-mirage images which floated through the field of my vision, yet leaving no trace upon the retina of my memory; refilling my body with the slim energies of perception, for in those far-fetched latitudes even the honey and locusts of John the Baptist did not occur as a form of sustenance; and a restless, purposeless locomotion through the dead flat terrain. Just one encounter for a short time took away the exhaustion of my mind by supplying me with a kind of feverish ground upon which to pursue some fitting occupation. Having more deeply explored the nature of the floating image phenomena, I considered them to be real and self-existing but also dependent on my volition in the way they leaped out of the empty space and were capable of interaction with me. They appeared as feeble, glimmering shadows when I was firmly resolved to pay them little or no attention, or they could brazen it out and attack me when I walked by like a scatter-brain. I was bewildered by uncertainty whether they too perceived me to be a faltering image. If indeed we were on equal footing, what was our mission on this planet? Now, I met more people with distinct professional attributes. On this one occasion, a group of them, dressed in tweed suits after the fashion of the nineteenth century, rode on antediluvian bicycles with a gigantic front wheel and a small rear one. These rum riders from the distance appeared to be rather sympathetic and harmless. I thought that they might be either journalists or clerks and so ventured to ask them a question, "What are we supposed to do around here?" They didn't feign to answer but pressed their pedals harder. However, I had time to notice the tiny meters attached to the front wheels of their vehicles. As they rolled, they periodically bent down to check these meters and aptly jotted indications in their leather notebooks. Sometimes one of them shouted out the number which I recognized as referring to the length of the Earth's equator. This observation struck me immediately as suggestive. Of course, these bikers were performing a valuable task! I wish I had been as smart and skilled as they to do something nearly so important. At this juncture, as if having read my mind, one of them got off the bicycle, came close to me, and hurriedly thrust in my hands the following instruments: a big ruler, Jacob's staff, and the reels of measuring tape. Then I was left alone and spared any further meetings.

My very fatigue wore out as I became a business-like person. Day and night, I was absorbed with all my heart and soul in this survey and contemplated the aim of measuring the equator. The length of the equator must have coincided with the number which I had recalled from high school and which was being shouted out by these people. It was really nice to know in advance what the result of your work should be. Thinking about it made me stronger and more aware of the meaning of life in general. I had learned even to admire the local nature, which turned out to be quite a simple and minimalist thing to do -- because of its total homogeneity, I was able to see what I wanted, wantonly relying on the fluctuations in my own character.

Everything was going all right until I somehow contracted an unknown sickness. First, I thought it to be a normal flu, but no one could check it and tell me for sure. This strange illness proved incurable despite all my thorough efforts of concentration. Accompanied by a bad fever, it progressed every moment. After two or three days passed, I became unable to move and had to take a break in my work. As if the balance of nature itself had been toppled by my predicament, it became very windy. A great storm was approaching. The sky grew overcast with fiery dark clouds which descended to the very ground like the wings of black smoke depicted in an apocalyptic scene. I lay helplessly on the rugged soil and dreamt only to die. I didn't count how many days and nights rolled over me. Once, as I woke, I found myself pacing through the desert, taking my survey. Both the weather and my condition were still bad if not worse, but the most frightening thing I observed was that my physical frame had become that of an old cripple and had decreased in stature. I was sadly reduced to skin and bones. The other scary symptom was that the surface of the planet had begun to self-destruct, giving rise to long cracks. Accidentally I tumbled into one of those.

It was an infinite downfall through the wide gorge of wet stone walls. As I flew, I tried to make sense of measuring and conscientiously adjusted the ruler to the stretches of blank air. But I had a presentiment of the looming base somewhere, first, because the forces of gravity were working as usual and, second, because the hole became more and more penetrated with light. In a wink I saw the opening that formed a conic dome over the patch of dazzling blue matter. With lightning speed I plunged into the water. To my great surprise, I perceived that my body had acquired a flawless shape, hence without the smallest exertion I floated to the surface of the blue ocean. The water shone with calm energy and gave me amazing power. It was a heavenly pleasure to swim in that water. Then I saw a canoe brought near me by the swift current. I climbed into the canoe, took a paddle from its bottom and solemnly looked around. This world was a thousand times more spacious and majestic than the bitter netherland from which I had fallen. The beauty of its violet sunless sky belied description -- this heaven dwelt between two spheres: the shining ocean in which I floated in my canoe and below, or above, as I related to it while swinging my head back, all green Earth covered with wild forests and abundant with life.