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Rh CHAPTER XXVIII

THE OUTER DARKNESS

stockade smouldered in the midst of a hard-baked plain, that was as brown as shoe-leather, and as devoid of any sort or kind of vegetation as though it were shaved every morning with some monstrous razor. Trees there were in the distance, marking more than half the sky-line, as though the place had been shaved especially for the stockade; but not a solitary bush was within reach. And the sight of the trees whose leaves they never heard, and whose shade they never felt, was one more torment to those of the eighty prisoners who still lifted their heads to look so far; the majority, however, let their dull eyes redden by the day together on those few hard and blinding yards which might chance to occupy their picks and shovels from five in the morning till the going-down of the sun.

All day they laboured in chains beneath the barrels and bayonets of the military. In the evening, when they returned to the stockade, loaded muskets and fixed bayonets showed them the way. Even in the stockade itself, fixed bayonets and loaded muskets gave them their supper. Thereafter they were locked up for the night in so many small boxes, lined with ledges something more spacious than book-shelves; on these ledges they lay down, as close as mummies in catacombs, until it should be five o’clock once more; and perhaps, after a time, the only sound would be the clank of his fetters as this man or that turned over, in the magnificent space of eighteen inches that was allotted to each.