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. These windows, each about a yard high and two yards broad, were heavily barred with gratings of round iron bars as thick as a man's wrist, set too close together for a boy's head to pass between them, and each two bars hot- welded at each intersection, so that each grating was practically one piece of wrought iron, made before the granary was built and with the ends of each bar set deep in the flinty old rubble concrete. The inmates need not be chained, as no escape was possible through the windows, though raw night air, rain, snow at times and the icy winter blasts came in on us through them. Similarly no escape was possible up the one entrance to the cellars, which was through an inner courtyard, from which led down a stone stair with four sets of heavy doors; one at the bottom, one at each end of a landing lighted by a heavily barred window, and one at the top. Between the inner and outer courtyard were two sets of heavier doors and two equally heavy were at the street entrance of the outer courtyard. On the stair-landing was the chained-up porter-accountant seated under the window on a backless stool by a small, heavy accountant's table on which stood a tall _clepsydra_ by his big account-book. Checking the hours by the _clepsydra_, he entered the name of every human being passing, up or down that stair, even the name of the manager every time he came in or went out. 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.