By him always stood a wild Scythian, armed with a spear, girt with a
sabre, and with a short bow and a quiver of short arrows hanging over his
back. Similar Scythians guarded the doorways, a pair of them to each door.
The slide by which the grain was lowered into the _ergastulum_, the other
slide by which the flour, coarse siftings and bran were hauled up, were
similarly guarded. Escape was made so difficult by these precautions that,
while I was there, no one escaped out of the three hundred wretches
confined in the _ergastulum_.
There we suffered sleepless nights in our hard bunks, under worn and
tattered quilts, tormented by every sort of vermin. Swarming with vermin
we toiled through the days, from the first hint of light to its last
glimmer, shivering in our ragged tunics, our bare feet numb on the chilly
pavements. We were cold, hungry, underfed on horribly revolting food,
reviled, abused, beaten and always smarting from old welts or new weals of
the whip-lashes.
It was all a nightmare: the toil, the lashings, if our monotonous walk
around our mill, eight men to a mill, two to each bar, did not suit the
notions of the room-overseer; the dampness, the cold, the vermin, the pain
of our unhealed bruises, the scanty food and its disgusting uneatableness.
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