Page:Ravished Armenia.djvu/186

 plains or were taken away without even being told what had been the fate of their husbands, sons and brothers.

When more Russian prisoners arrived Nail Pasha crowded Armenians into the prisons in the daytime and killed them, and then compelled the Russians to carry out the bodies and remove the blood before they could lie down to rest from their day’s labor in the fields or on the stonework of his new house. The soldiers of Nail Pasha told with great enjoyment how the bodies of little Armenian children had been mixed in with cement and built into the walls of the new house to fill the spaces between the stones.

The Tchetchens who had stolen us from the monastery decided to enter the city by its southern gate—where the walls reach down almost to the river banks. But when they had galloped around that way soldiers from the gate came out and told them the Vali had issued orders that no more refugees were to be brought into the city until some of those already within the walls were “cleared out”—massacred or sent away.

Afterward I learned why the city itself was crowded with refugees while so many others were camped outside the walls. The Vali promised protection from further deportation to all who had managed to preserve enough money to bribe him. These he allowed to go within the city and occupy deserted houses.