“Well, Madam, they have means of knowing those who are transported, and they are certain the two young men were not among the recent gangs sent. They suppose them to be in the fortress of ‘St. Peter and St. Paul’, at least that’s what they say.”
“You speak as if you doubted it.”
“I do doubt it.”
“They have been sent to Siberia after all?”
“Ah, Madam, there are worse places than Siberia. In Siberia there is a chance: in the dreadful Trogzmondoff there is none.”
“What is the Trogzmondoff?”
“A bleak ‘Rock in the Baltic,’ Madam, the prison in which death is the only goal that releases the victim.”
Dorothy rose trembling, staring at him, her lips white.
“‘A Rock in the Baltic!’ Is that a prison, and not a fortress, then?”
“It is both prison and fortress, Madam. If Russia ever takes the risk of arresting a foreigner, it is to the Trogzmondoff he is sent. They drown the victims there; drown them in their cells. There is a spring in the rock, and through the line of cells it runs like a beautiful rivulet, but the pulling of a lever outside stops the exit of the water, and drowns every prisoner within. The bodies are placed one by one on a smooth, inclined shute of polished sandstone, down which this rivulet runs so they glide out into space, and drop two hundred feet into the Baltic Sea. No matter in what condition such a body is found, or how recent may have been the execution, it is but a drowned man in the Baltic. There are no marks of bullet or strangulation, and the currents bear them swiftly away from the rock.”