Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/30

14 hours a day and thirty days a month without once taking them off except to bathe—of course they get dirty!"

"If a prisoner has no spare clothing," I inquired, "how does he get his one shirt washed? Does he never wash it, or does he go half the time naked?"

"When he visits the bath-house," replied Captain Makófski, "he usually washes at the same time his body and his clothing, dries the latter as best he can, and puts it on again—he has no change."

I referred to the sufferings of exiles who are compelled to sleep in wet clothing after every rain-storm on the road, and said I did not wonder that the hospitals of the forwarding prisons were crowded with the sick. He assented and said, "The life of prisoners on the road is awful. So far as the condition of the prisons here depends upon me," he continued after a moment's pause, "it is as good as circumstances will permit. There are no accumulations of filth anywhere, and the sanitary condition of the buildings is as good as I can make it—better perhaps than that of many private houses in the city."

It was interesting and instructive to me to see how unconscious Captain Makófski seemed to be of the existence of any very extraordinary evils in the Irkútsk prisons. Apparently he had grown so accustomed to the state of things there that it seemed to him to be nearly if not quite normal, and it gave him a sort of mental shock to find that the new Governor-general was so dissatisfied with the prisons and their management. He attributed this dissatisfaction, however, largely to the influence of the Countess Ignátief, whom he characterized as a kind-hearted but inexperienced lady who did not appreciate the difficulties in the way of such a system of prison administration as she desired to bring about.

"The Countess, however," I said, "seems to be a lady of quick perceptions and unusually good sense. An officer of the exile administration whom I met at dinner yesterday