Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/267

 CHAPTER XXVI

"SARYN DA NA KIECHKU"

HE prison is asleep. A light, easily roused slumber has gradually drawn its quieting mantle over the bodies stretched out on wooden beds or benches and covered with spotted blankets, or simply the ordinary grey cloaks of the prisoners. No noises of scraping bolts and rattling locks are heard; only the loud tread of the guard on duty in the corridor breaks the unusual silence. At times the measured reports of his steps die down and his dimming outline disappears in the darkness, to emerge again a few moments later in the lighted end of the long corridor, behind whose grated and barred doors the unhappy inmates sleep or ponder how they may escape. For the nonce the oaths and curses invented by the prisoners, the scoldings of the keepers and the continuous clankings of the irons have ceased.

Cell No. 1, opposite my little window, is also silent, held in the dim thrall of a small lamp that gives forth a cloud of odours but very little light. In the corner near the door there stands a big iron bucket, the parasha, the worst torture of the criminal prison. On the wooden benches along the walls are sleeping about one hundred of the most important members of the colony of condemned, for these are the so-called "Ivans" or old, hardened habitual criminals, men who for years have been intimately acquainted with all the prisons of Russia, with 255