“I looked around the cell,” says Kennan. “There was practically no ventilation whatever, and the air was so poisoned and foul that I could hardly force myself to breathe it. We visited successively in the yard six _kameras_ or cells, essentially like the first, and found in every one of them three or four times the number of prisoners for which it was intended, and five or six times the number for which it had adequate air space. In most of the cells there was not room enough on the sleeping platforms for all of the convicts, and scores of men slept every night on the foul, muddy floors, under the _nary_, ‘sleeping platforms,’ and in the gangways between them and the walls.” The main building, containing the kitchen, the workshops, the hospital and a large number of _kameras_, was in a worse sanitary condition than the barracks. The air in the corridors and cells, particularly on the second story, was indescribably foul. The oxygen had been breathed again and again; it was laden with fever germs from the unventilated hospital wards, fetid odours from diseased human lungs and unclean human bodies, and the stench of unmentionable receptacles. “It was like trying to breathe in an underground hospital drain,” says Kennan. The kitchen was a dark, dirty room in the basement where three or four half naked cooks were baking large loaves and preparing soup. The bread was sour and heavy, but as good as that usually eaten by Russian peasants; the soup was found to be good and nutritious. The hospital was on the third floor and the wards were larger and lighter than the _kameras_, but wholly unventilated; no disinfectants were in use, and the air was polluted to the last degree. The prospect of regaining health in such unwholesome dens was small. A man in robust condition must certainly become infected in a few weeks, and there was little hope for the recovery of the sick. All the worst disorders were to be found among the patients; scurvy, typhus fever, typhoid fever, acute bronchitis, rheumatism and syphilis. Only the patients affected by malignant typhus were isolated in a single ward. The women were separated from the men, but that was all. “The patients, both men and women, seemed to be not only desperately sick, but hopeless and heart broken.” The mortality was excessive. Typhus was epidemic every year. The prison was uniformly overcrowded; it had been built for eight hundred and generally contained eighteen hundred. Some scanty ventilation was possible when the windows could be opened, but in the stormy autumn or bitter winter no fresh air could be admitted.