One morning he threw himself on the ground near the wall and covered his face with his cloak.
“Why am I so afraid?” he asked himself. “What harm can come to me here? Aristides will not hurt me. Aristides is my friend.”
Presently, he slept. It was a burning July day, and here, in this roofless prison, the air burned one’s skin. There was a faint, foul odour. The hard, enamelled sky and the sun beating on the walls mocked the prisoners. The sentry on the little raised platform in their midst looked pale and ill. A boy-prisoner—he had stabbed his mother—moaned occasionally in his sleep. There was little sound in any of the prison’s four compartments, for everyone was lying down exhausted—some asleep, some merely stupefied. Everyone except Aristides. The giant, saturnine and insolent, promenaded like an emperor who has covered himself with degradation. His eyes, examining the sweating men around him, picked out Cavalcini. Walking up to him, he kicked his victim on the buttocks. Cavalcini lifted his head and, seeing Aristides, staggered to his feet.
“Walk with me!” commanded Aristides.
For a full hour they strode up and down, no word passing between them, Cavalcini apprehensive and trembling, Aristides bearing himself as though ten thousand eyes were upon him.
A slow month crawled from the future into the past. There were hours—especially at night time when all the prisoners lay herded together in the big room upstairs—in which Cavalcini took the edge off his suffering by thoughts and half-formulated plans of escape. In his heart he knew he would never escape, that he would never attempt it, but it gave him pleasure to devise schemes for eluding the sentry, for scaling the walls, for leaving Salonika for the freer world of Marseilles or Port Said.
One day he thought he would curry favour with Aristides by talking to him of his plans. So, very humbly and with his eyes on the ground, he walked over to where the big bearded man was standing.
“I’ve had something on my mind for a long time past,” he began; “something in which you might be willing to help me.”
“Well,” said Aristides, “what is it?”
“Escape—escape from this den—this den of animals.”