very thought of those three which I had seen, was enough to terrify me
to the heart. So we went to my room, and she charged me again to be very
obedient to all commands, for if I was not, I was sure to undergo the
torment of the dry pan."
Llorente, the Spanish historian and secretary-general of the
Inquisition, relates the following incident: "A physician, Juan de
Salas, was accused of having used a profane expression, twelve months
before, in the heat of debate. He denied the accusation, and produced
several witnesses to prove his innocence. But Moriz, the inquisitor at
Valladolid, where the charge was laid, caused de Salas to be brought
into his presence in the torture-chamber, stripped to his shirt, and
laid on a LADDER or DONKEY, an instrument resembling a wooden trough,
just large enough to receive the body, with no bottom, but having a
bar or bars to placed that the body bent, by its own weight, into an
exquisitely painful position. His head was lower than his heels, and the
breathing, in consequence, became exceedingly difficult. The poor man,
so laid, was bound around the arms and legs with hempen cords, each of
them encircling the limb eleven times.
"During this part of the operation they admonished him to confess the
blasphemy; but he only answered that he had never spoken a sentence
of such a kind, and then, resigning himself to suffer, repeated the
Athanasian creed, and prayed to God and our Lady many times. Being
still bound, they raised his head, covered his face with a piece of fine
linen, and, forcing open the mouth, caused water to drip into it from an
earthen jar, slightly perforated at the bottom, producing in addition
to his sufferings from distension, a horrid sensation of choking. But
again, when they removed the jar for a moment, he declared that he had
never uttered such a sentence; and this he often repeated. They then
pulled the cords on his right leg, cutting into the flesh, replaced the
linen on his face, dropped the water as before, and tightened the cords
on his right leg the second time; but still he maintained that he
had never spoken such a thing; and in answer to the questions of his
tormentors, constantly reiterated that he HAD NEVER SPOKEN THOSE WORDS.
Moriz then pronounced that the said torture should be regarded as
begun, but not finished; and De Salas was released, to live, if he could
survive, in the incessant apprehension that if he gave the slightest
umbrage to a familiar, he would be carried again into the same chamber,
and be RACKED IN EVERY LIMB."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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