He remembered that in one of these cells the dauntless Karakozov was frightfully maltreated by being deprived of sleep. The gendarmes, who were changed every two hours, were ordered to keep him awake. Karakozov was inventive, and as he sat on his small stool he would cross his legs, and swing one of them to make his tormentors believe he was up; meanwhile he would steal a nap, continuing to swing his leg. When the gendarmes--depraved, imbruted blood-spillers--discovered the deception, they shook him every few moments whether he swung his limb or not. It is also quite certain that all his joints were crushed, for when he was taken out from the fortress to be hanged, he looked like a lump of rubber or heap of jelly. His head, arms, legs, trunk, were altogether loose as if they contained no bones or only broken ones. It was terrible to see the strenuous efforts he made to ascend the scaffold. Kropotkin was taken to another black hall where armed sentries were moving. He thought of the mighty Bakunin, who was kept in an Austrian prison chained to the wall for two years, and then spent six more in this Fortress of Peter and Paul, and yet came out as fresh and pink as a boy. He was put into a cell--a casemate originally intended for a cannon. A heavy oak door was shut behind him, a huge key turned in the lock, and the prince who had slept in the lap of an empress, who had been petted by Nicholas I., and who as sergeant of the corps of pages became the closest personal attendant of Alexander II., was left alone in a darksome reduit. The prisoner examined his cell. High up in the granite wall a hole was cut. Kropotkin dragged his stool there, looked out and listened. Emptiness--no sound. He tapped the walls--no response. He struck the floor with his foot--no reply. He spoke to the sentry--no answer. The coldness, the dampness, the darkness were bad enuf, but this utter silence, this intense stillness, this grave-like deadness were maddening. No human being addressed him; no living thing held intercourse with him--except the pigeons which came morning and afternoon to his window to receive food thru the grating. Only the bells of the fortress cathedral were heard. Every quarter of an hour they chimed to the glory of Jesus, and every midnight they pealed forth, "God save the Czar." Then all was mute ... and nothing more.... Not only did no one speak to him, he was not even permitted to speak to himself. When the killing silence first began to oppress him, he hummed a tune. Then the spirit of song took hold of him, and he raised his voice. He sang from his favorite opera, Glinka's _Ruslan and Ludmila_--"Have I then to say farewell to love forever?" "Sir," said a bass voice thru the food-window, "do not sing!" A few days later, Peter Kropotkin could not sing. FOOTNOTES: [28] See the "Memoirs of a Revolutionist." [29] See the "Russian Bastille" by Simon O. Pollock in the International Socialist Review, March 1907.