Olga had caught the Empress's friendly bow to Ivor, and she too relaxed somewhat the frigid demeanour she had evinced towards him, since their conversation regarding Count Mellikoff, and flashed upon him one of her most lovely smiles, as he put out his arm and almost lifted her to her place in the second sleigh. The Tsar and Tsarina drove alone in the foremost equipage, preceded and protected on either side by the guard, while in the second were seated Olga, the equerry, Patouchki, and Ivor.
The gates were flung wide apart, and thus, with the horses prancing, the bells ringing, to which the clanking swords made a monotonous echo, and the sun shining, the Royal party crossed the gay boulevard now thronged with people, and drew up at the grim and frowning archway of Peter's gloomy fortress.
CHAPTER III.
ST. PETER AND ST. PAUL.
Petropavlovsk is in itself a giant fastness, covering, as it does, three-quarters of a square mile, and divided into so many rambling corridors, barracks, ravelins, bastions, curtains, and store-houses, as to be for the most part unknown even to the officials who form its ménage, and who, having certain portions of the immense structure set apart for their duties, live out their lives without exploring, or being permitted to explore beyond their individual domains.
The boulevard and the canal intersect the building, and separate the citadel proper from what is known as the "crown work," which lies to the rear.
Dreary indeed is the outlook for the unfortunate political suspect who is hurried by night, blindfolded and closely guarded, into this living tomb. To him, hastened along through unfamiliar passages and by echoing walls, conveyed hither and thither through succeeding gates and vaulted corridors, no possible effort of memory, or mathematical calculation, can ever aid him to determine which one of the many courts, bastions, or redoubts is that selected for his incarceration.
Nor, indeed, will he ever know, for when at last the gendarmes halt, and he is allowed the use of his eyes, he finds himself in a small court-yard completely enclosed by high walls, above which only a limited sky line is visible. And where this court-yard is situated, to what bastion it appertains, whether it faces the river or lies back from it, what is its relation to the door of egress, or its connection with the other casemates of the prison, not the wildest conjecture can establish, or the keenest intuition demonstrate.
The part of the fortress, however, which the Tsar had selected for his inspection, was that known as the Trubetskoi bastion, one of the largest and most impregnable, projecting as it does well on to the river side, in the direction of the Bourse. The shape of this bastion resembles as much as possible a bishop's mitre, as worn by the Western Church; it is built, in two storeys of stone and brick, around a court-yard of its own, which extends beyond the building proper and terminates in high thick walls, that completely shut it out and in from all communication save that afforded by a narrow vaulted passage, always strongly guarded. The interior consists of two tiers of casemates, opening on to narrow corridors, two dark punishment cells, overseers' rooms, kitchen and soldiers' quarters. In the court-yard are a bath house and one or two stunted shrubs.