The cautious watcher of the skies was not, however, to be
fooled by any such fol-de-rol and stood his ground. Fortunately at this
point the beefy _planton_ yelled from the doorway "Let him in," and I was
accordingly let in, to the gratification of my friends, and against the
better judgment of the guardian of the _cour_, who muttered something
about having more than enough to do already.
I had not been mistaken as to the size of the men's yard: it was
certainly not more than twenty yards deep and fifteen wide. By the
distinctness with which the shouts of _les femmes_ reached my ears I
perceived that the two _cours_ adjoined. They were separated by a stone
wall ten feet in height, which I had already remarked (while _en route_
to _les douches_) as forming one end of the _cour des femmes_. The men's
_cour_ had another stone wall slightly higher than the first, and which
ran parallel to it; the two remaining sides, which were property ends,
were made by the familiar barbed-wire.
The furniture of the _cour_ was simple: in the middle of the further end,
a wooden sentry-box was placed just inside the wire; a curious
contrivance, which I discovered to be a sister to the booth upstairs,
graced the wall on the left which separated the two _cours_, while
further up on this wall a horizontal iron bar projected from the stone at
a height of seven feet and was supported at its other end by a wooden
post, the idea apparently being to give the prisoners a little taste of
gymnastics; a minute wooden shed filled the right upper corner and served
secondarily as a very partial shelter for the men and primarily as a
stable for an extraordinary water-wagon, composed of a wooden barrel on
two wheels with shafts which would not possibly accommodate anything
larger than a diminutive donkey (but in which I myself was to walk not
infrequently, as it proved); parallel to the second stone wall, but at a
safe distance from it, stretched a couple of iron girders serving as a
barbarously cold seat for any unfortunate who could not remain on his
feet the entire time; on the ground close by the shed lay amusement
devices numbers two and three--a huge iron cannon-ball and the six-foot
iron axle of a departed wagon--for testing the strength of the prisoners
and beguiling any time which might lie heavily on their hands after they
had regaled themselves with the horizontal bar; and finally, a dozen
mangy apple-trees, fighting for their very lives in the angry soil,
proclaimed to all the world that the _cour_ itself was in reality a
_verger_.
Pages:
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120