Suddenly the electric lights are switched on and a bell starts ringing in a loud, metallic, persistent note, not unlike the subway starting bells. A heavy, automatic, dull noise in the distance announces the approaching footsteps of the convicts returning from work. In measured step, each gang followed by its keeper, more than a thousand men march past the head keeper's desk.
All the varieties of ages, figures, physiognomies, expressions, are illustrated to my astonished eyes. Young men with red cheeks and simple faces; strong men with bullet heads, broad shouldered, surly or impassive; fat men with wabbling bellies and cheerful faces; old men bent and hoary with age; slow and listless young men with effeminate gestures; a few cripples on sticks or crutches, and wobbling along behind the lines, a paralytic led by a companion. They all file by, stamping their feet in German military fashion.
At moments the order is given to slow up or stop, and the convicts continue to move the legs in rhythmic step, their bodies almost touching, and giving the appearance of an enormous centipede dancing a gruesome, macabre saraband.
Finely shaped heads are rare; it looks as if an almighty sculptor had left his handiwork unfinished, or purposely kept it in rude outline. Foreheads are either too bulging or too retreating, eyes too sunken or too protruding, noses too large or too small, mouths too sensual or too cruel, chins too powerful or too weak.
Smiling or frowning, aggressive or indifferent, surly or pleasant, all the different expressions and gestures are sketched out in violent chiaroscuro, and compose a cartoon worthy of a Frans Hals or a Michelangelo.
My eyes absorb the kaleidoscopic, ignoble, unbelievable pageant. As an artist I am fascinated, hypnotized by this fantastic procession of human zebras, slashed with broad stripes of gray and black, with the four prison tiers as a background, and the dark blue uniforms and gold buttons of the keepers adding a touch of color.
As a human being I am shocked and repelled by this grotesque, degrading parade.
Is this really the Inferno or only the last Judgment, I ask myself?
"Get in line, you loafer!" shouts a red-faced keeper, shaking his stick at me. Thus I am awakened from my dreams.