Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/246

234 this?" he replied with a good deal of disdain, at the same time trying to take hold of my neck again.

"Then take that," and, with a strong lunge on the jaw, I sent him over clean. His group immediately retreated, muttering:

"Eh! this is a bad bird."

My over-intimate acquaintance picked himself up rather leisurely and went off without saying a word for a walk in the cage.

"That is Mironoff," explained one of the keepers, who came up to me. "You struck him hard and he will now respect you."

An hour later in my cell, which had only a single small window near the ceiling and was but four paces in length, I began walking up and down and reflecting on the characteristic way the prison had met me—with poison and fight.

"Here one must either give up and flee from life or fight with his own strength, in order to have anything approaching a possible existence," I wrote in my notebook as my first observation on the criminal prison.

Although to me now the memories and impressions from the prisons at Harbin, Vladivostok, Nikolsk, Nikolaievsk and Habarovsk form one immense black and gloomy background of a life crushingly monotonous through its continual torture, there pass across the foreground of this great canvas of memory, like flashes of bright and dazzling lightning, unusual figures, events fraught with strength and impulse, unhappy souls, sometimes beautiful in their tortures and longings and, at others, unbelievably powerful in their actions.

Unknown and unknowable Fate threw me into these "stone bags" filled with human dust; into this strange world full of contradictions, with a life revolving ever