The _étape_ at Achinsk, for instance, between Tomsk and Krasnoyarsk, is described by a newspaper of Irkutsk as “a _cloaca_ where human beings perish like flies. Typhus fever, diphtheria and other epidemic diseases prevail there constantly, and infect all who have the misfortune to get into that awful place,” and a St. Petersburg newspaper says, “There one doctor has on his hands more than three hundred sick.” A correspondent wrote to a Tomsk journal, “As soon as you enter the court-yard of the prison you notice the contaminated, miasmatic air.... Dante himself would have thrown down his pen if he had been required to describe the damp, cold, dilapidated cells of this prison. At night myriads of bed-bugs torture every prisoner into a condition not far removed from frenzy. The prison sometimes has six hundred inmates and to its filth and disorder are attributable the typhus fever, diphtheria and other diseases that spread from it, as from a pit of contagion, to the population of the city.” In the Isham _étape_, the cold was intense and the exiles arriving had no warm clothing. One man was frozen to death on the road. At Cheremkhovsky the air space which was barely enough for two persons had to serve for thirty. It was described by a prisoner as “a grave and not a prison.” At Kirinsk, the building of decayed logs would have fallen down had it not been shored up by other logs equally rotten. A prisoner, to show the state of the wood, thrust his fingers out of sight into the wall. We have seen how the marching parties were accompanied by a large contingent of sick who were unfit to travel and yet could not be left behind, sometimes even at the point of death. They were compelled to sit all day in a cramped position in the rude carts, intensifying the already acute pains of their often mortal ailments, and were exposed to all conditions of the weather. When dry and warm, they were enveloped in clouds of dust, causing intolerable discomfort, especially in the case of disease of the respiratory organs; when cold and inclement, still worse dangers attended the exposure to snow and wintry winds. No change into dry clothing on arrival was feasible, for with inconceivable carelessness the baggage was allowed to become soaked through on the road. The baggage carts were unprovided with cover even by tarpaulins. Thus the sickly, in the worst stages of illness, were forced to lie down upon the same platforms, side by side with the more robust, to whom they quickly passed the contagion of their diseases. In the rare cases when the _étape_ was provided with a lazaret, newcomers who were ill might fare better, but the average _étape_ hospital was infamously bad.