Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/161

Rh name, near the junction of the Kará River with the Shílka. It was built nearly half a century ago, when the Government first began to work the Kará gold placers with convict labor. As one approaches it from the south it looks like a long, low horse-car stable made of squared but unpainted logs, which are now black, weather-beaten, and decaying from age. Taken in connection with its inclosed yard it makes a nearly perfect square of about one hundred feet, two sides of which are formed by the prison buildings and two sides by a stockade about twenty-five feet in height, made of closely set logs, sharpened at the top like colossal lead-pencils. As we approached the courtyard gate, an armed Cossack, who stood in the black-barred sentry-box beside it, presented arms to Major Pótulof and shouted, "Stárshe!" — the usual call for the officer of the day. A Cossack corporal ran to the entrance with a bunch of keys in his hand, unlocked the huge padlock that secured the small door in the larger wooden gate, and admitted us to the prison courtyard. As we entered three or four convicts, with half-shaven heads, ran hastily across the yard to take their places in their cells for inspection. We ascended two or three steps incrusted with an indescribable coating of filth and ice an inch and a half thick, and entered, through a heavy plank door, a long, low, and very dark corridor, whose broken and decaying floor felt wet and slippery to the feet, and whose atmosphere, although warm, was very damp, and saturated with the strong peculiar odor that is characteristic of Siberian prisons. A person who has once inhaled that odor can never forget it: and yet it is so unlike any other bad smell in the world that I hardly know with what to compare it. I can ask you to imagine cellar air, every atom of which has been half a dozen times through human lungs and is heavy with carbonic acid; to imagine that air still further vitiated by foul, pungent, slightly ammoniacal exhalations from long unwashed human bodies; to imagine that it has a