Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/309

Rh, heavy with the fevered breath of the sick, and pervaded by a faint odor of liniment and drugs, was so insufferable that I was glad, after a quick glance about the room, to escape into the corridor. The first regular kámera that we examined was about twenty-two feet square and seven or eight feet high, with two windows, a large brick oven, and a plank sleeping-platform extending around three of its sides. There was no provision for ventilation, and the air was almost, if not quite, as bad as in the worst cells of the prisons at Ust Kará. I could breathe enough of it to sustain life, and that was all. The first thing that particularly attracted my attention, after I entered the kámera, was a broad band of dull red which extended around the dingy, whitewashed walls, just above the sleeping-platform, like a spotty dado of iron rust. Noticing that I was looking at it with curiosity, Lieutenant-colonel Saltstein remarked, with a half-humorous, half-cynical smile, that the prisoners had been "trying to paint their walls red."

"What is it, any way?" I inquired, and stepping to one end of the sleeping-platform I made a closer examination. The dull-red band at once resolved itself into a multitude of contiguous or overlapping blood-stains, with here and there the dried and flattened body of a bedbug sticking to the whitewash. I had no further difficulty in guessing the nature and significance of the discoloration. The tortured and sleepless prisoners had been "trying to paint their walls red" by crushing bedbugs with their hands, as high up as they could reach while lying on the nári, and in this way had so stained the dingy whitewash with their own blood that at a little distance there seemed to be a dado of iron rust around the three sides of the kámera where they slept. How many years this had been going on, how many thousand convicts had helped to "paint" those "walls red," I do not know; but I had suffered enough in Siberia myself from vermin fully to understand and appreciate the significance of that dull-red band.

It is unnecessary to describe in detail the other kámeras