“Torture him until he speaks,” he said, and abruptly left the cabin.
The pirates silently advanced on their victim.
“The first man that dares approach me, shall die under this sword,” shrieked the midshipman, furiously, and brandished his sword, madly. Still the pirates advanced more closely to him. They beat down his guard, surrounded him, and, in the twinkling of an eye, he was bound hand and foot. Lifting him bodily, the pirates carried him on their shoulders out of the cabin.
He was then taken to a narrow compartment at the very bows of the vessel, that was, it seemed, the torture-room.
The appearance of the room was sufficient to strike one at once with an idea of the bloody and cruel deeds that might be perpetrated there. It was a narrow cabin into which the light could never penetrate; for there was no opening either for that or for fresh air. The small door which led into it was narrow and low: it turned on a spring, and seemed so difficult to be opened, that one was forced to imagine that it was either loth to let out those that had once got in, or that it was eager to close in for ever upon those that might enter through it.
The deck was scoured as white as chalk, and, like the shops of cleanly butchers in the morning, was scattered over with sand. The sides of the cabin, as if to augment the darkness that already reigned, were painted a dark, sombre, and gloomy colour, which was here and there stained by the damp.
In contrast to this prevalent hue of frightful black, hung a variety of exquisitely-polished torturing instruments. Cruelty, or expediency, or necessity, seems to have exhausted its power of invention in designing them, so different were they in form, and so horridly suited to the purpose of giving pain.
These seemed to frown malignantly on those who entered that narrow place; and the imagination might even trace, in their burnished hue, and high efficient condition, a morbid desire, or longing, to be used.
To make the “darkness visible,” and to reveal the horror of the place, an old bronzed lamp hung from the beams of the upper deck, and threw a faint and sickly light around.
In the centre of this cabin lay a long, narrow, and deep box, which was garnished within with millions of sharp-pointed spikes. The torture which the victim suffered in this machine, was a continued pricking from the spikes, against which he was every moment suddenly and violently driven by the lurching of the vessel.