The policemen, accompanied by the jailer, showed me into a temporary cell.
The jailer, if memory serves me right, was called Kasper Schlüssel and, with his grey woollen bonnet, the stem of his pipe stuck between his teeth and the bunch of keys on his belt, he came over to me like the Owl god people worship in the Caribbean. He had his great round gilded eyes that can see in the dark, his curved nose and his bull neck.
Schlüssel locked me up with a minimum of fuss like a person putting socks into a wardrobe, his mind elsewhere. As for me, my hands behind my back, head bowed, I stood there for more than ten minutes without moving from the spot. Then I looked at my cell. It had just been newly whitewashed and its walls were still empty of graffiti, apart from a gallows roughly drawn in one corner by the previous inmate. The light came through a bull's-eye window situated nine or ten feet up from the floor; the furniture consisted of a bale of straw and a bathtub.
I sat down on the straw, my hands around my knees, in a state of dejection beggaring belief….
Almost simultaneously I heard Schlüssel crossing the corridor. He re-opened the door of my cell and told me to follow him. He still had as his attendants the two shillelagh men. Resolutely I dogged his heels.
We passed through long galleries lit here and there by internal windows. I perceived behind a grille the notorious Jick-Jack who was due to be executed the following day. He was wearing a strait jacket and singing in a raucous voice:
"I am the king of these mountains!"
When he saw me, he shouted:
"Yo, comrade! I'll keep a place for you at my right hand."
The two policemen and the Owl god exchanged smiles with one another while I could feel goose bumps up and down my spine.