irksome enough to work eight or ten hours daily in an icy gallery, three hundred feet below ground; the mines were badly ventilated, and the gases liberated by the explosives used may be injurious; but there are no deadly exhalations from poisonous ores to affect the health, and no doubt the worst feature of penal servitude in Siberia was not the hard labour in the mines but the almost inconceivably foul condition and enforced idleness of the prisons. Returning now to the Kara prisons, seven in number, two of them were allotted to politicals, one for each sex, and of the remaining five the total population was approximately eighteen hundred convicts. Half of them were detained as prisoners; the other half were permitted generally to join the “free command.” The latter were still convicts, receiving rations and restricted to the settlement, but residing in barracks or in their own houses. The prison building of Ust Kara, at the Lower Diggings, is compared by Kennan to “a long, low, horse-car stable made of squared but unpainted logs, which are now black, weather-beaten, and decaying from age.” It was in the form of a square surrounded by logs twenty-five feet high, closely set together, and sharpened at the top like enormous lead pencils. Entrance was gained after ascending a few steps through a heavy wooden door opening upon a long, low and very dark corridor with a wet, slippery floor, much broken and damaged. The first sensation was that of damp air laden with the fetid odours that constantly vitiate all Siberian prisons. Kennan was unable to compare it to any known bad smell. He says, “I can ask you to imagine cellar air, every atom of which has been half a dozen times through human lungs and is heavy with carbonic acid; to imagine that air still further vitiated by foul, pungent, slightly ammoniacal exhalations from long unwashed human bodies.... To unaccustomed senses, it seems so saturated with foulness and disease as to be almost insupportable. As we entered the corridor, slipped upon the wet, filthy floor, and caught the first breath of this air, Major Potulov (the commandant) turned to me with a scowl of disgust, and exclaimed, ‘It is a repulsive prison.’” In the cells there was absolutely no ventilation whatever. Even the brick oven drew its air from the corridor. The walls of squared logs had once been whitewashed, but had become dark and grimy, and were blotched in many places with extensive bloodstains, the life blood of countless insatiable enemies, bed-bugs, crushed to death in unceasing warfare. The floor was deeply encrusted with dry, hard-trodden filth. The sloping wooden platforms on which the convicts slept side by side, closely packed, without bedding or covering, were inconceivably dirty. All the cells were the same except that in one a shoemaker’s bench diffused the quite pleasing odour of fresh leather.