“It is the cell where they confine the soldiers of the garrison,” explained the person next me. “It won’t hold more than one or two persons.”
Hardly had he given me this information before the officer in charge of our guard came hurrying up. He gave some directions to his men, who commenced pushing and urging us along the gallery to a small door in the wall at our back. This they threw open, and beckoned to the prisoners to enter.
“By heaven, it is the Black Hole!” exclaimed some one in the throng.
There was a murmur of disbelief, followed by one of indignation, as those who were in front looked in. The room was barely seven paces across each way, and very low. The only openings it contained, beside the doorway, were two small windows giving, not on to the open air, but merely on to the covered passage in which we had been standing.
“But this is absurd!” cried Mr. Holwell, remonstrating with the soldiers. “There is not even standing-room for a hundred and fifty persons in there.”
“They cannot intend that we are all to go in. We should be suffocated,” said another.
The soldiers beginning to show anger, some of the company walked in to demonstrate how restricted the space was. Nevertheless the Moors continued to press us towards the doorway, and seeing that they were in earnest, I whispered to Marian to give me her arm, and went in with the first. By this means I was just in time to secure Marian a place at the corner of one of the windows, where she would have a chance to breathe. I took up my position next to her, and we were quickly surrounded and closely pressed on by those who followed. Before we had well realised what was happening to us, the whole of the prisoners had been thrust into the cell, and the door, which opened inwards, pulled to with a slam and locked.
The moment this happened I found myself bursting out into a most prodigious sweat—the water running out of my skin as though squeezed from a sponge—by the mere press of people in that confined space; and near as I stood to the window I soon began to experience a difficulty in breathing, so foul did the air immediately become. The sufferings of those further back in the apartment must of course have been much worse. The door was no sooner closed than those next to it began to make frantic efforts to open it again; but we were so closely packed that, even if the door had not been locked, it would have been scarcely possible to open it wide enough to allow of any persons going through. Every mind seemed to become at once possessed with a sense of our desperate situation, and the groans and cries for mercy became heartrending.
Mr. Holwell, having been the first to enter, had been fortunate enough to secure a place at the other window. He now exerted himself, as the leader of the party, to calm the tumult.