This was not a silent and a patient crowd like that in the barn had been. The greater number of these men had suffered too long and too terribly. Their state had been bad enough before this new instalment of prisoners was thrust in upon them; now it was immeasurably worse. Here were men pressed together by thousands in a stone hall that could not have accommodated a hundred in comfort—pressed together so closely that there was no room to sit or lie down.
To be sure they had air from the open gratings at each end of the hall; but the walls on each side were reeking with moisture and sickening with mould, and the ground floor under their feet was paved only with round stones like those in the middle of the streets, and was in many places worn with deep holes, where water had gathered, in which the men stood ankle deep.
Many of these men were suffering from wounds, not serious in the beginning, else they had not been brought here, but inflamed and fevered by neglect and ill treatment; many were racked with neuralgia and rheumatism from constant exposure to damp and cold; many were ill from revolting forms of disease brought on by foul food. And added to all this, all were suffering from hunger, thirst and weariness. And there was no relief and no prospect of relief.
Here, over these prison doors, might have been inscribed the awful motto over the gates of Hell:
WHO ENTERS HERE LEAVES HOPE BEHIND.
Here were agonizing groans and heart-rending prayers; heavy complainings and bitter upbraidings; deeply breathed maledictions and fiercely muttered vows of vengeance.
The rays of a gas lamp at the corner of the street, streaming through the grating, lighted up the ghastly faces of these prisoners with a wild and lurid glare. They looked like the inhabitants of Tartarus. The place seemed at once a purgatory and a pandemonium.
Britomarte—for the first time in all her military career—shuddered with horror.
“Keep near the grating, my dearest, with your face to the bars, so that you may get as much fresh air as possible,” whispered a faint voice close to her ear.
She turned quickly and saw the face of her lover, pallid in the lamp-light.