Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/333

Rh On Wednesday, August 26,—the day appointed,—Mr. Petukhóf sent word to me that unforeseen circumstances would prevent him from going to the prison with us, but that we need not postpone our visit on his account. An inspecting party therefore was made up of Colonel Yágodkin, Mr. Pépeláief (the chief of the local exile bureau), and the convoy officer of the barge, Mr. Frost, and myself. It was one of the cold, gray, gloomy days that often come to Western Siberia in the late summer, when the sky is a canopy of motionless leaden clouds, and the wind blows sharply down across the túndras from the arctic ocean. The air was raw, with a suggestion of dampness, and an overcoat was not uncomfortable as we rode out to the eastern end of the city.

The first glimpse that we caught of the Tomsk forwarding prison showed us that it differed widely in type from all the Siberian prisons we had previously seen. Instead of the huge white, three-story, stuccoed building, with narrow arched windows and red tin roof, that we had expected to find, we saw before us something that looked like the permanent fortified camp of a regiment of soldiers, or like a small prairie village on the frontier, surrounded by a high stockade of sharpened logs to protect it from hostile Indians. With the exception of the zigzag-barred sentry-boxes at the corners, and the soldiers, who with shouldered rifles paced slowly back and forth along its sides, there was hardly a suggestion of a prison about it. It was simply a stockaded inclosure about three acres in extent, situated on an open prairie beyond the city limits, with a pyramidal church-tower and the board roofs of fifteen or twenty log buildings showing above the serrated edge of the palisade. If we had had any doubts, however, with regard to the nature of the place, the familiar jingling of chains, which came to our ears as we stopped in front of the wooden gate, would have set such doubts at rest.

In response to a summons sent by Mr. Pépeláief through the officer of the day, the warden of the prison, a short,