The Arkansaw traveler., 1889-06-29
IN A RUSSIAN PRISON.

George kennAn, in June Century.
 "A Cossack corporal ran to the entrance with a bunch of keys in his hand, unlocked the huge pad lock that secured the small door in the larger wooden gate, and admitted to the prison court yard. Three or four convicts, with half shaven heads, hastily across the yard entered, to take their places in their cells for inspection We ascended two or three steps incrusted with an
 ndescribable coating of filth and ice an inch and half thick, and entered through a heavy plank door, long, low, and very dark corridor, the broken and decaying floor of which was 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 the Siberian prisons. person who has once inhaled that odor forget 1t and yet 1t is so unlike any other bad smell in the world that hardly know with what to compare 1t. l can ask you to imagine cellar air, every atom of which has been half dozen times through human lungs and is heavy with carbonic acid to imagine that air still further vitiated by foul pungent, slightly ammoniacal exhalations from long unwashed human bodies; to imagine that 1t has suggestion Of damp, decaying wood, and more than 6 suggestion of human excrement-and still you will have no adequate idea of 1t. To unaccustomed senses 1t seems 90 saturated with foulness and disease to be almost insupportable. As we entered the cor ridor, slipped upon the wet, filthy floor, and caught the first breath of this air, Major Potulof turned to me with a sco VI of disgust and exclamed 'Otcrdtelni tuYndp (Ot-vra te tel nee tyoor. ma) 1t Is a repulsive prison !s
 "The Cossack corporal who preceded threw open the heavy wooden doors of the first k0merd (kah- mer -ah) and shouted, 'Smiynon (Smeer- no)- Be quiet ? the customary warning of the guard to the prisoners when . officer Is about to enter the cell We stepped across the threshold into a room about twenty -four feet long, twenty two feet wide, and eight feet high, which contained twenty nine convicts. The air here was 90 much worse than the air in the corridor that 1t 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 provision anywhere for ventilation. Even the brick oven, by which the cell was warmed, drew its 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 copvicts had crushed bed-bugs. The floor was made of heavy blanks, and, although 1t had been recently swept, 1t was incrused with dry 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 to the walls and their feet ex- tended toward the middle of the cell. They had neither pillows nor blankets, and were compelled to lie down upon these sleeping benches at night without removing their clothing and without other covering than their coarse gray overcoats. The coll contained furniture of any kind, except these sleeping platforms, the brick oven, and large wooden tub. When the door was locked for the night each of these twenty mine prisoners would have for eight or ten hours consumption, packing box i've feet square and five feet high. Il could discover no way in which single cubic foot of fresh air could get into that cell after the doors had haan cloaed for the night0