Page:Ossendowski - The Shadow of the Gloomy East.djvu/127

Rh Regularly every morning the place is raided by the police, which searches and examines documents; some of those caught there are flogged, others dragged to prison, and all terrified and tired out to death.

And thus passes night after night for weeks and months, till the unemployed peasants, with the perfect education of the night asylum, give themselves up to the employer of "black labour." Now they have become familiar with the city; they know how to retort boldly and quickly, have forgotten to bow low, looking insolently straight into people's eyes; they do not uncover their heads before holy images any more; they have a look of hatred and of resignation.

Now they start the true factory life, leading either to prison or back to the village, carrying with it new customs and diseases.

One of the favourite occupations of the peasants who went into the towns to earn their living was the loading of barks and ships and "burlatstvo."

Here it was always possible to make a bare living, and all who wasted long days and weeks in search of work, wandering in hunger and cold through the pitiless streets of the town or through night asylums, were allowed into it. This kind of work had the additional attraction that it was not subjected to law and authority. Man or woman was here a simple beast, like the horse or the mule, to be paid for bodily work, nothing else having any value or mattering anything.

Man, woman, young children formed one straining