XXVI
Only after a long while did the influence, the pernicious influx of the thought waves emanating from hundreds of convict minds, begin to play on my mind. I never imagined that convict habits and thoughts could touch me or have any effect on my inmost thoughts, my better self. During the day, in fact, when the conscious mind was active, nothing seemed to effect my habitual, set and crystallized character, my old trend of mental, moral and intellectual associations.
Only in the last month, during my sleep or half-sleep, did I recognize the ascendency of the magnetic, unhealthy, collective thoughts of the prison. They arose slowly, like poisonous miasmas, insidious and permeating, with a persistency that amazed my startled and thoroughly alarmed consciousness.
Thoughts, images, desires, which I had been used from my youth and all through my life to consider unhealthy, degenerate or simply unworthy of my attention, came sneaking into my subconscious mind, in the form of disgusting, appalling, terrifying dreams. The back yard of my mind had begun to register and absorb all the wretched, unclean, monstrous, unmentionable yearnings, desires and actions of the collective prison dreams; it was inhaling the moral stench which arose as from a "cloaca maxima."
I thought of all the weak, unbalanced, receptive young minds which must have been corrupted by this intangible, powerful magnetism; and of how this unnatural, abnormal, degrading prison life began in any absorbent or indifferent temperament a slow corrosion and led to a complete and effective disruption and destruction of all moral and intellectual integrity.
I felt as if hundreds of unspeakable and undreamed of sins, taking shape of gliding snakes, noiseless and black, with glittering eyes and fiery tongues, were descending upon me, winding round my body and my legs and arms, fastening their pin-like fangs in my flesh to poison my brain and body.
And I thanked my stars and my fate and my power of will when the last night of my sentence arrived to relieve me of an oppressive, suffocating succession of nightmares.
I did not sleep one solitary wink, but how rosy, exquisite, exhilarating, radiant, were the thoughts that filled me on that prison cot, how transparent those bars seemed on that last night, never to be forgotten, like the first night I spent in that horrible dungeon.