But the most jealously guarded of all the treasures stood before the altar. It was a granite pillar enclosed within silver rails.
On the granite was engraven: "Upon this spot knelt Czar Alexander, attended by his faithful servants, the Archimandrite Photios and Alexis Andreovitch Araktseieff, in the year 1818."
Thither Photios brought the statesman, that he might see his name perpetuated beside that of the Czar.
"So high you had raised yourself. Now come and see how low you have sunk!"
The Archimandrite led the penitent back to the cloister and showed him his, the Archimandrite's, cell. It was a space six feet broad by eight feet long. But there was one luxury in it: it had a window through which sunshine penetrated. His bed was a coffin roughly put together; his prie-dieu a stone hollowed out by constant kneeling; a jug and a bowl for the daily kwas the sole furniture of the cell. Yet all this was luxury compared with what awaited the penitent.
In the catacombs of the cloister were caves hewn out of solid rock, just large enough to contain a man kneeling or recumbent; a small hole in the heavy iron door let in air. Total darkness reigned. These caves were inhabited by the whilom great, powerful aristocrats, masters over hundreds of thousands, now no longer masters of their own souls. It is not tyranny, not the power of the sacred hierarchy which holds them bound here, but their own blind zeal. Despising, hating the world, they are self-condemned to the awful imprisonment. The catacombs of the cloisters of St. George and of Solowetshk ever harbor numbers thus self-condemned to a living death.
It pleased Araktseieff.
Lying upon his straw he passed days and weeks. His door was kept locked by day, only to be opened at sound of the vesper bell, when he went to seek for food, for food is not brought to penitents. Only at dusk may they steal into the cloister garden to seek for mangel-wurzel, samphire, potatoes, and such like produce of the earth, their sole sustenance. One day Araktseieff came across a still more remarkable penitent than himself.
He, too, had once been a distinguished bojar; but none knew what his real name was. Here he was only known as "Little Father Nahum."
Nahum did not even allow himself the luxury of a ragged cassock. His sole covering is a rush mat woven by himself, his white hair and gray beard flow wildly down over his dirt-begrimed limbs. Nahum does not allow himself lodging in a cave. In summer he sleeps in pools, in winter he creeps into a dung-heap. To kneel day after day in his cave is not humiliation enough for him; he prostrates himself across the threshold of the church door, that those who enter may walk over him, kick him, spit on him. To gather fresh roots out of the earth and eat them Little Father Nahum looks upon as sinful gluttony. He seeks his evening meal from the dust-heap; what is thrown there is his sustenance.