There were old men and women with grey hair and shrivelled skins, looking more like moving skeletons than living people, with scarcely enough cloth or leaves for decent covering. Strong, capable women were there who should have been working happily at home for their husbands; women with babies only a few days’ or weeks’ old at their breasts; women in delicate health; young girls; the wives of husbands who had somehow failed to satisfy the demands made upon them; and young lads who had tried to shirk paddling the heavily laden rubber boats—all these were there, crowded together in that one shed without privacy or sanitary arrangement of any kind from sundown to sunrise, and some of them for weeks together. The smell was horrible, the hunger and thirst intense, and the publicity in some ways worst of all. I myself was not hungry that first night, and Bamatafe came to and fro with food for me on the following days; but much of it I never ate. Some of my fellow-prisoners were so ravenously hungry, that it was impossible to save any scraps, even if I had wanted to. Many of them, coming from a distance, had no friends to supply their needs. Early in the morning we were turned out in charge of sentries to clean the paths of the compound, carry water, work on houses, cut up and pack rubber, and carry the filled baskets from the store to the river ready for transport by canoe or boat to the place of the great rubber chief down river. If the work done failed to satisfy the sentry, or he had any old scores to pay off to a prisoner who was in his power, the chicotte or the butt-end of the gun was always at hand, and proved an easy means of chastisement for either man or woman, the latter frequently incurring it for nothing worse than a desire for chastity. Then at sundown we were marched back to the prison house for another night of horrors. It was often impossible to sleep. On one night in particular we were kept awake hour after hour by the groaning of some of the sick ones, and then towards morning, after a little sleep, we were aroused again by the puny wail of a new-born babe. Was it any wonder that its first cries were weak, and that the little life so recently given seemed on the point of ebbing away? In the morning the sentries agreed that the mother was not fit for work, and reported to the white man accordingly; but three days afterwards the mother was out at work in the hot sun with her baby at her back. Many prisoners died at the time of which I speak—two, three, five, sometimes ten in a day—there was so much hunger and thirst and sickness. When one died, they tied a string round his foot, and dragged him a little way into the bush, dug a shallow hole, and covered him with earth. There were so many that the place became a great mound, and the burials were so carelessly done that one could often see a foot, hand, or even head left exposed; and the stench became so bad that people were unable to pass by the road which was near the “grave.”