Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/112

90 pounds of this black bread, about six ounces of boiled meat, and two or three ounces of coarsely ground barley or oats, with a bowl of kvas morning and evening for drink.

After we had examined the workshops, the kitchen, and most of the kámeras in the first and second stories, the smatrítel turned to me and said, "Do you wish to go through the hospital wards?" "Certainly," I replied; "we wish to see everything that there is to be seen in the prison." The warden shrugged his shoulders, as if he could not understand a curiosity which was strong enough to take travelers into a Siberian prison hospital; but, without making any remarks, he led the way up another flight of stone steps to the third story, which was given up entirely to the sick. The hospital wards, which numbered five or six, were larger and lighter than any of the cells that we had previously examined in the main building, but they were wholly unventilated, no disinfectants apparently were used in them, and the air was polluted to the last possible degree. It did not seem to me that a well man could live there a week without becoming infected with disease, and that a sick man should ever recover in that awful atmosphere was inconceivable. In each ward were twelve or fifteen small iron bedsteads, set with their heads to the walls round three sides of the room, and separated one from another by about five feet of space. Each bedstead was furnished with a thin mattress consisting of a coarse gray bed-tick filled with straw, a single pillow, and either a gray blanket or a ragged quilt. Mr. Frost thought that some of the beds were supplied with coarse gray linen sheets and pillow-cases, but I did not notice anything of the kind. Over the head of each bedstead was a small blackboard, bearing in Russian and Latin