The spider and the fly

The cover image was restored by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
The Spider and the Fly is the title under which this story originally appeared, serially, in an English publication.

CHAPTER I.
A SWIM FOR LIFE.
It is sunset; a dusky red is spreading out from the horizon and throwing a duskier reflection upon the sullen sea and its more sullen shore. A weird, awful shore it is, encumbered with huge rocks and strangely hewn stone.
A grim, shuddering waste, made grimmer and more terrible by strange, stray specks of humanity, that, seen in the falling sunlight seemed rather distorted creations of fancy than actual human beings; from stone to stone they pace, stepping with a peculiar, halting, laborious gait, and looking sullenly earthward as if their eyes were chained to the hateful, barren shore and the looking upward were death.
Look closer and gain fresh cause for wonderment. There is a strange likeness in these dim figures. They move alike, their gaze is directed sullenly downward alike, they are dressed alike. A sad, dingy, gray garment, half shirt, half tunic, relieved in all cases by a patch of crimson across the arm, upon which is stamped, in letters of black relief, a number. Their feet are shod with thick, heavy, iron-soled boots; a coarse, hideous cap is upon their heads, and the hair beneath it is cut almost to the skin.
The faces—ah, no! who could describe those faces? Who can speak of those crime-stamped brows, those passion-distorted lips, and those despairing eyes?
Listen! There is no sound but the sudden crash, crash of the falling stone that the coarse-grained hands are pushing, and the bent, gray-clad shoulders are heaving, from the quarries. One other sound still, heard only at intervals when the stone is silent, and that is the tramp, tramp of the sentries, who, like the figures of Death and Eternity in the old Roman temple, forever, day and night, march to and fro on the battlements, forever, night and day, keeping watch and ward on the terrible, gray-clad figures, that despairingly toil upon the barren plain below.