Page:The Enormous Room.pdf/84

Rh it was certainly not more than twenty yards deep and fifteen wide. By the distinctness with which the shouts of les femmes reached my ears I perceived that the two cours adjoined. They were separated by a stone wall ten feet in height, which I had already remarked (while en route to les douches) as forming one end of the cour des femmes. The men's cour had another stone wall slightly higher than the first, and which ran parallel to it; the two remaining sides, which were property ends, were made by the familiar barbed-wire.

The furniture of the cour was simple: in the middle of the further end, a wooden sentry-box was placed just inside the wire; a curious contrivance, which I discovered to be a sister to the booth upstairs, graced the wall on the left which separated the two cours, while further up on this wall a horizontal iron bar projected from the stone at a height of seven feet and was supported at its other end by a wooden post, the idea apparently being to give the prisoners a little taste of gymnastics; a minute wooden shed filled the right upper corner and served secondarily as a very partial shelter for the men and primarily as a stable for an extraordinary water-wagon, composed of a wooden barrel on two wheels with shafts which would not possibly accommodate anything larger than a diminutive donkey (but in which I myself was to walk not infrequently, as it proved); parallel to the second stone wall, but at a safe distance from it, stretched a couple of iron girders serving as a barbarously cold seat for any unfortunate who could not remain on his feet the entire time; on the ground close by the shed lay amusement devices numbers two and three—a huge iron cannon-ball and the six-foot iron axle of a departed wagon—for testing the strength of the prisoners and beguiling any time which might lie heavily on their hands after they had regaled themselves with the horizontal bar; and finally, a dozen mangy apple-trees, fighting for their very lives in the angry soil, proclaimed to all the world that the cour itself was in reality a verger.