Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/241

Rh from the mountains must be prevented from entering their grated windows; and the sight of a human being not clothed in a turnkey's uniform must never gladden their weary, homesick eyes. I have wished many times that his Excellency Governor-general Anúchin might be shut up for one  A, Main Prison Building; B, Kitchen and Bath-house; C, Small Solitary-confinement cells, not now used; 1, 2, 3, 4, Large kamera or cells designated respectively by the prisoners as "Academia." "Dvorianka," "Yakutka,"and"Kharchofka"; 5, Kámera used as a prison hospital, or lazaret; 6, Water-closet; 7, Main Corridor; 8, Bath-room; 9, Kitchen; a, Ovens; b, Entry-ways; c, Sentry-boxes; d, Stockade around prison buildings; e, Gate to prison yard; f, Bath-house dressing-room.

year in the political prison at the mines of Kará; that he might look out for 365 days upon the weather-beaten logs of a high stockade; that he might lie for 365 nights on a bare sleeping-platform infested with vermin; and that he might breathe, night and day, for fifty-two consecutive weeks the air of a close kámera, saturated with the poisonous stench of an uncovered excrement-bucket. Then he might say to himself, with a more vivid realization of its meaning, "A prison is not a palace."

When Colonel Kononóvich, in 1881, resigned his position as governor of the Kará penal establishment, his place was taken by Major Pótulof, who had previously been connected in some official capacity with the prison administration of the Nérchinsk silver mines. Shortly after Pótulof assumed command, all of the male political convicts, who then numbered about one hundred, were transferred to the new political prison erected by Colonel Kononóvich at the