Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/253

Rh such a state of destitution and despair that she finally shot herself.

On the 6th of July, 1882, eight of the political convicts, who were regarded by the Government for some reason as particularly dangerous, were sent back in chains from Kará to St. Petersburg to be immured for life in the "stone bags" of the castle of Schlusselburg. A few days later — about the middle of July — all the rest of the state criminals were brought back to the political prison at the Lower Diggings, where they were put into new and much smaller cells that had been made by erecting partitions in the original kámeras in such a manner as to divide each of them into thirds. The effect of this change was to crowd every group of seven or eight men into a cell that was so nearly filled by the sleeping-platform as to leave no room for locomotion. Two men could not stand side by side in the narrow space between the edge of the platform and the wall, and the occupants of the cell were therefore compelled to sit or lie all day on the plank nári without occupation for either minds or bodies. To add to their misery, paráshas were set in their small cells, and the air at times became so offensive and polluted that, to use the expression of one of them in a letter to me, "it was simply maddening." No other reply was made to their petitions and remonstrances than a threat from Khaltúrin that if they did not keep quiet they would be flogged. With a view to intimidating them Khaltúrin even sent a surgeon to make a physical examination of one political, for the avowed purpose of ascertaining whether his state of health was such that he could be flogged without endangering his life. This was the last straw. The wretched state criminals, deprived of exercise, living under