Overtures were made and amelioration in their condition was promised; fears of flogging were ridiculous, the officials said, and nothing of the kind had been contemplated. But the strike continued, for the strikers had no confidence in the plausible assurances of the governor. On the tenth day of starvation, the state of affairs was desperate. The indomitable sufferers had reached the last stage of physical exhaustion, and release by death seemed close at hand. The struggle was anxiously watched from St. Petersburg. Telegrams passed daily between the local authorities and the minister of the interior, who could only suggest medical intervention, which does not seem to have been tried beyond feeling pulses and taking the bodily temperatures. The wives of the strikers were finally granted the unusual privilege of an interview, on condition that they would implore their husbands to take food. These loving entreaties, backed by fresh promises from the commandant, finally overcame the resolution of the politicals, and on the thirteenth day of abstention the great hunger strike ended. The physical endurance called forth by a hunger strike has been well described by Leo Deutsch, who was driven to refuse food by his ill-usage in the Odessa prison in the early stages of his sentence. His well-known character for sturdy defiance had so disturbed the prison authorities that they had taken extraordinary precautions to secure him, by lodging him in a dark underground cell, with no bedding except straw infested with rats, and no ventilation. He decided to starve himself in protest. They threatened to feed him artificially; he retorted that he knew how to bring on sickness. Then they listened to his very justifiable protest, and on the fourth day he ended his strike. He says, “It was only when I began to eat that I realised how fearfully hungry I was. I could have devoured an ox.... During the two following days I felt very seedy, as though I had had a bad illness.”