Once again Lem found himself marching through the rain between his captors, and all the unknown strange noises of a city consolidated and merged into a tumult that harried his very soul. His next distinct impression came when he realized that Burton was unlocking his handcuffs.
He was now inside of a jail. He stood before a desk and a man in uniform was putting various questions to him in a curt and gruff voice, concerning his age and residence, to which Lem answered in an apathetic, dazed way. The man made a record of these responses in a book. While he was thus occupied, Lem was eyeing his awesome surroundings.
Now for the first time, he was conscious that Burton and his deputy had disappeared, and another man in uniform stood at his side. The desk-man presently handed this officer a pink slip, and he in turn told Lem to follow, leading the way across a big rotunda of concrete to a huge iron-barred gate which he unlocked. He ushered the prisoner into a long corridor, and transferred him to the care of a second uniformed guard, who proceeded to search Lem's clothes with a skill and deftness that would have inspired envy in the bosom of a professional pickpocket.
The guard seated Lem on a bench which was already occupied by two men in blue cotton shirts, and the perversely striped trousers of convict garb.
"Blinky," said the guard, "where's Last Time?" addressing a huge convict with red hair, a mop and a bucket.
"He's over at the bath house."
"Send him front when he comes back. And you," turning to Lem, "sit there till you're wanted."
Whereupon, with the pink slip in his hand, he walked to a small desk at the farther side of the corridor and sat in an arm-chair with his back toward the three now on the wooden bench, waiting for Lem knew not what.
In the meantime, Lem's eyes roved about making a grim inventory of this great merciless cage that had engulfed his body. He was inside a mammoth arcade-like structure that stretched its repellent length out a thousand feet and more to a blind, sinister end. Along its sides, equi-distant, appeared high arched double windows, bolted and barred with a lattice-work of iron. Wherever Lem perceived a spot of God's light, a cold, forbidding hand lay across it like a blasphemy, spreading out its unyielding, black, skeleton fingers to enmesh a human soul.
Moreover, this stupendous, invulnerable shell incased and jealously protected a second structure equally strong and grisly, for as Lem looked, he noted this other structure occupying the center of the arcade. It was a tomb within a tomb, and the boy's already heavy heart sickened as his eyes slid down the seemingly interminable vista of small iron-barred doors, some four feet apart, that diminished in perspective toward the distant end until they shrank to the size of a newspaper.