There had been no chance to escape.  From the beginning when he dreamed the fiery dream of Poland's independence he had become a puppet in the hands of Fate.  From the beginning at Warsaw at St. Petersburg in the Siberian mines in Kamtchatka on the crazy boats of the fur-thieves Fate had been driving him to this end.  Without doubt in the foundations of the world was graved this end for him for him who was so fine and sensitive whose nerves scarcely sheltered under his skin who was a dreamer and a poet and an artist.  Before he was dreamed of it had been determined that the quivering bundle of sensitiveness that constituted him should be doomed to live in raw and howling savagery and to die in this far land of night in this dark place beyond the last boundaries of the world...