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his teeth and looking impatiently at his watch. From the other side with awkward, convulsive movements there approached the crippled Hagen; he was moving with amazing rapidity, jumping like a pony. Carson greeted him carelessly and said something to him. Prokop strained his ears to catch what they were saying but could not hear a single word; perhaps the wind was carrying them away. Hagen pointed to the horizon with a preternaturally long and shrivelled hand; what were they saying? Hagen turned round, put his hand to his mouth and took out a golden set of teeth and his jaws as well; now instead of a mouth he had a great black hole which giggled voicelessly. With the other hand he extracted one enormous eye from its socket, and, holding it in his fingers, held it close down to the faces of the dead. Meanwhile the gold set of teeth in his other hand was screeching: “Seventeen thousand one hundred and twenty-one, one hundred and twenty-two, one hundred and twenty-three.” Prokop was unable to move, as he were dead. The horrible bloodshot eye touched his face and the horse’s set of teeth counted: “Seventeen thousand one hundred and twenty-nine.” Now Hagen disappeared in the distance, still counting, and across the corpses there jumped the Princess, with her skirts drawn up shamelessly high. She approached Prokop waving in her hands a Tartar bunchuk, as if it were a whip. She stood over Prokop, tickling him under the nose with it, and sticking the point of her shoe into his head, as if trying to find out whether he was dead. The blood trickled down his face, although he was really dead, so dead that he felt within him his heart