Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/527

SIBERIA 511 Prison, a large two-storied brick building situated on the outskirts of the town. From the central and principal entrance a flight of stone steps lead to landings on the first and second story. Right and left of these are light, spacious, well-ventilated corridors, 100 by 15 feet, and on either side of these the " kameras," or public cells. There are sixteen in all, eight on each floor. I entered and minutely examined each, and can safely say that so far as regards cleanliness, ventilation, and light, no prison in Europe could have been better. The walls were whitewashed, the wooden flooring scraped and spotlessly clean, while three large barred windows [looking on to a public thoroughfare] let in light and air. Most of the prisoners were employed — some tailoring, some cobbling, others cigarette-making, and a few reading and writing — for a well-behaved convict in Siberia has many privileges. I should mention that the most crowded " kamera " I saw measured eighty feet long by twenty-four broad, and was fifteen feet high. It contained forty-one men, each of whom had his own canvas mattress and linen pillow [marked with the Government stamp] laid out upon the sleeping-platform, seventy feet long by fourteen broad, that ran down the center of the room. The sanitary arrangements were here, as elsewhere, perfect. I could not, throughout the prison, detect an offensive or even disagreeable smell. The infirmary in the upper story consists of two lofty rooms each forty-six feet long by eighteen feet broad. The wards are made to accommodate thirty patients, but there were to-day only six in all. Here, again, the light, cheerful rooms, iron bedsteads, clean white sheets, and scrupulous cleanliness would have done credit to a London or Paris hospital. Convalescents were dressed in warm, white flannel dressing-gowns, striped with blue — the infirmary costume. As I left, broth and white bread were brought to a patient. The prison doctor attends regularly morning and evening. With a passing glance at the pretty chapel, we next visited the ground floor, which consists of cells for political prisoners ; four punishment cells [not dark] ; a stone chamber, bisected by a wire grating, where prisoners are permitted to see their friends ; the kitchen and bakery. I saw but two politicals — one a journalist undergoing a sentence of three months' impris- onment for a seditious article in a local newspaper ; the other, for a greater offense, on his way from Moscow to Nertchinsk. Both wore their own clothes. A table, a chair, books, writing-materials, a lamp, and an iron bedstead, with linen sheets and pillow, comprised the furniture of these cells, which measured twelve feet high and twenty feet long by sixteen feet broad, and looked out through a large barred window on to the prison garden. The punishment cells, which with one exception were empty, measured eight feet high, ten feet long by ten broad. A description of the kitchen, with its clean, white-washed walls, tiled floor, huge caldrons for soup, and bright copper saucepans — of the bakery, with its innumerable ovens and rows upon rows of bread, brown and white, would be superfluous. Suffice it to say that a prisoner actually receives half a pound of meat,