Page:Adventures of Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw of Mitrowitz (1862).djvu/189

 into the eyes and steeps the whole body, whence arises excessive agony, especially to silken hands unaccustomed to work, on which blisters are formed from the oars, and yet give way with the oar one must; for when the superintendent of the boat sees anyone taking breath, and resting, he immediately beats him, naked as he is, either with the usual galley-slave scourge, or with a wet rope dipped in the sea, till he makes abundance of bloody weals over his whole body. Under all this you must be silent, and neither look at him nor cry out “Oh!” or you have immediately twice as many blows, and these cutting words in addition:—“Pregidy anaseny, sigligum, irlasem?” “Ha, dog, why dost thou murmur, contradict, and get angry?”

Thus, too, it happened to one of our company, an Austrian knight, a grey-haired man, who, when a Turk struck him with the usual scourge over the naked shoulders, cried out twice or thrice,—“Oh! for God’s sake, do not beat me!” The Turk, not understanding the language in which he spoke, imagined that he was reviling him, and therefore beat the poor wretch violently, so that he was obliged to learn patience with the rest. No man can narrate that exceeding misery, or believe that the human body, tortured with all manner of suffering, can bear and endure so much. In the first place, a man is not only baked, but even roasted, all day long by the excessive heat; secondly, he must pull at the oar till his bones and all his veins crack; and thirdly, every moment he must expect the usual scourge, or the dipped rope; and frequently some jackanapes of a rascally Turkish boy amuses himself with beating the captives from bench to bench one after the other, and laughing at