"
Our winter at the mills may have benefited us, but it was certainly, with
its successor at similar mills, one of the two most wretched winters of my
life. And Agathemer, I think, suffered every bit as acutely as I. We were
not chained, except for a few days and about twice as many more nights; as
soon as the manager of the _ergastulum_ felt that he knew us he let us go
unchained like the rest of his charges.
This was because of the structure of the _ergastulum_. It was located in
the cellars of one of the six or more granaries of Placentia, which has,
near each city gate, an extensive public store-house. The granary under
which we were immured was that near the Cremona gate. Above ground it was
a series of rectangles about courtyards each just big enough to
accommodate four carts, all unloading or loading at once. It was
everywhere of four stories of bin-rooms, all built of coarse hard-faced
rubble concrete. The cellars were very extensive, and not all on one
level, being cunningly planned to be everywhere about the same depth
underground. Where their floor-levels altered the two were joined by short
flights of three, four or five stone steps, under a vaulted doorway, in
the thick partition walls.
Each cellar-floor was about four yards below the ground level so that a
tall man, standing on a tall man's shoulders, could barely reach with his
outstretched fingers the tip of the sill of one of the low windows.
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