"Human feeling!" cried Ammalát, as he wiped the cold sweat from his forehead, "why visitest thou a heart which has torn itself from humanity? Away, away! Is it for me to fear to take off the head of a dead man, whom I have robbed of life! For him 'twill be no loss--to me a treasure. Dust is insensible!"
Ammalát struck a light with a trembling hand, blew up into a flame some dry bourián, (a dry grass of South Russia,) and went with it to search for the new-made grave. The loosened earth, and a large cross, pointed out the last habitation of the colonel. He tore up the cross, and began to dig up the mound with it; he broke through the arch of brickwork, which had not yet become hardened, and finally tore the lead from the coffin. The bourián, flaring up, threw an uncertain bloody-bluish tinge on all around. Leaning over the dead, the murderer, paler than the corpse itself, gazed unmovingly on his work; he forgot why he had come--he turned away his head from the reek of rottenness--his gorge rose within him when he saw the bloody-headed worms that crawled from under the clothes. Interrupted in their loathsome work, they, scared by the light, crept into a mass, and hid themselves beneath each other. At length, steeling himself to the deed, he brandished his dagger, and each time his erring hand missed its aim. Nor revenge, nor ambition, nor love--in a word, not one of those passions which had urged him to the frenzied crime, now encouraged him to the nameless horror. Turning away his head, in a sort of insensibility he began to hew at the neck of Verkhóffsky--at the fifth blow the head parted from the trunk. Shuddering with disgust, he threw it into a bag which he had prepared, and hastened from the grave. Hitherto he had remained master of himself; but when, with his dreadful treasure, he was scrambling up, when the stones crumbling noisily under his feet, and he, covered with sand, fell backwards on Verkhóffsky's corpse, then presence of mind left the sacrilegious. It seemed as if a flame had seized him, and spirits of hell, dancing and grinning, had surrounded him. With a heavy groan he tore himself away, crawled half senseless out of the suffocating grave, and hurried off, dreading to look back. Leaping on his horse, he urged it on, over rocks and ravines, and each bush that caught his dress seemed to him the hand of a corpse; the cracking of every branch, the shriek of every jackal, sounded like the cry of his twice-murdered friend.