UNDERGROUND

121

Walked fast. The platform was already six hundred meters behind. Looking around, he now saw only its end edge, brightly lit by a lantern, and remembered that he had forgotten to look at the name.

Boris was already wandering with the last of his strength, stumbling, swaying from side to side, and one day without noticing it, he headed down from the embankment into some kind of ravine and came to his senses only when he stumbled and fell. He stopped keeping track of time, on flat areas, sometimes decently moved away from the railway. Several times I stumbled over sleepers covered with snow. It seemed to him that he was sleeping, and he heard someone sigh with a wheeze, but this time he knew who was making this sound.

Amidst the cacophony of the night, the monotonous signal soon began to predominate. Three tense short beeps, repeated at regular intervals of approximately one second. To Boris, this sound was like Morse code. With every second, the sound became clearer, it became clear tha