For however intolerable the heat and burden of the day, it
was as nothing compared with the horrors which each night renewed. The
moment of twilight came and with it Idris es Saier, the great negro of
the Gawaamah tribe, and his fellow-gaolers.
"Into the House of Stone!" he cried.
Praying and cursing, with the sound of the pitiless whips falling
perpetually upon the backs of the hindmost, the prisoners jostled and
struggled at the narrow entrance to the prison house. Already it was
occupied by some thirty captives, lying upon the swamped mud floor or
supported against the wall in the last extremities of weakness and
disease. Two hundred more were driven in at night and penned there till
morning. The room was perhaps thirty feet square, of which four feet
were occupied by a solid pillar supporting the roof. There was no window
in the building; a few small apertures near the roof made a pretence of
giving air, and into this foul and pestilent hovel the prisoners were
packed, screaming and fighting. The door was closed upon them, utter
darkness replaced the twilight, so that a man could not distinguish even
the outlines of the heads of the neighbours who wedged him in.
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