Wichita eagle. [volume] (Wichita, Kan.) 1886-1890, 1889-06-22
THE UST KARA PRISON.
/ The Vile Conditions Which Surround Con-
victs In Siberian Dungeons.

The Vile Conditions Which Surround Con-
victs In Siberian Dungeons.
A Cossack corporal ran to the entrance
with bunch of keys in his hand, unlocked
the huge paddock that secured the small door
in the larger wooden gate, and admitted us
to the prison court yard. Three or four con-
victs, with half shaven heads, ran hastily
across the yard as we entered, to take their
places in their cells for inspection. We as
cended two or three steps incrusted with an
indescribable coating of filth and ice an inch
and a half thick, and entered, through a
heavy plank door, long, low and very dark
corridor, the broken and decaying floor of
which felt wet and slippery to the feet, and
where the atmosphere, although warm, was
very damp and saturated with the strong
peculiar odor that is characteristic of Siberian
prisons. A person who has once inhaled that
odor can never forget it; and vet it is so I'M
like any other bad smell in the world that
hardly know with what to compare it.
l can ask you TO imagine cellar air, every
atom of which has been half dozen times
through human lungs and is heavy with car
bonic acid; to imagine that air still further
vitiated by foul, pungent, slightly ammoni-
acal exhalations from long unwashed human
bodies; to imagine that it has suggestion of
damp, decaying wood and more than sug
gestion of human excrement-and still you
will have no adequate idea of it. To unac-
customed senses it seems so saturated with
foulness and disease as to be almost insup-
portable AS we entered the corridor,
slipped upon the wet, filthy floor and caught
the first breath of this air, Maj. Potulof
turned to me with a scowl of disgust and ex-
claimed: "Otvratitelni tiurma!" (Ot-vra-
tetelnee tyoor- ma)-"It is a repulsive
prison!"
The Cossack corporal who preceded US
threw open the heavy wooden door of the
first kamera (kah merahl and shouted "Smir-
mol" tSmeer no)-'Be quiet!" the customary
warning of the guard to the prisoners when
an officer is about to enter the cell. We
stepped across the threshold into a room
about "a feet long, % feet wide and S feet
high, which contained twenty-nine convicts.
The air here was so much worse than the air
in the corridor that it made me faint and
sick. The room was lighted by two nearly
square, heavily grated windows with double
saShes, that could not be raised or opened,
and there was not the least apparent provis-
ion anywhere for ventilation. Even the
brick oven, by which the cells were warmed,
drew It's air from the corridor.
The walls of the kamera were of squared
logs, and had once been whitewashed; but
they had become dark and grimy from lapse
of time, and were blotched in hundreds of
places with dull red blood stains where the
convicts had crushed bedbugs
The floor was made of heavy planks. and,
although it had recently been swept, it was
incrusted with dry, hard trodden filth Out
from the walls on three sides of the room
projected low, sloping wooden platforms
about six feet wide, upon which the convicts
slept, side by side, in closely packed rows,
with their heads 10 the walls and their feet
extended towards the middle Of the cell.
They had neither pillows nor blankets, and
were compelled 10 lie down upon these sleep
ing benches at night without removing their
clothing and without other covering than
their coarse gray overcoats. The cell con-
tanned no furniture Of any kind, except these
sleeping platforms, the brick oven and q
large wooden tub.
When the door was locked for the night
each one OF these twenty nine prisoners would
have, for eight or ten hours consumption,
about as much air as would be contained in
a packing box five feet square and five feet
high. / could discover no way in which a
single cubic foot Of fresh air could get into
that cell after the doors had been closed for
the night.-George KEENAN, in Century.