The prison hospital is situated in this first district, an ancient edifice erected with part of the funds subscribed in times past to purchase freedom for Christian captives enslaved by the Barbary Moors. The building is of good size, well ventilated, and enjoys good hygienic conditions. But the defects and shortcomings in Spanish administration extend even to Ceuta and the prison hospital, which a local authority says "is detestably organised and mounted miserably." The roof is so slight that it affords no proper protection in summer and the intense heat of the blazing sun striking through is very injurious to the patients. The medical resources are small and inferior; the beds few and unclean; the whole of the interior arrangements, furniture fittings and appliances, insufficient and worn out. There is no mortuary and to add a small detail in proof of the imperfections, autopsies were performed in a small den, part of the hospital proper, without disinfectants and the essential appliances for carrying out post mortems. Patients seldom made a long stay in the hospital, for they were rarely admitted until they had reached the last stages of an illness and came in as a rule only to die. The second district contains the principal quarters for convicts. One is in the chief barrack called _cuartel principal_ and another in the fortress _el Hacho_.[17] Some further evidence of their evil condition may be extracted from an account given by Salillas. "It is impossible to conceive," he writes, "a more unsuitable, unsavoury place for a prison. The rooms and dormitories occupied by the convicts are dark and gloomy, always damp, full of pestilential odours and dirty beyond description. The floors are of beaten earth, ever secure hiding places for all forbidden articles, weapons, tools for compassing escape, jars of drink, the fiery and poisonous _aguardiente_. It seems to me extraordinary," he goes on to say, "that life under such conditions is possible. A thousand and odd men who seldom if ever wash, who never change their clothes, are crowded together promiscuously in small, unclean, ill-ventilated, noisome dens and must surely engender and propagate loathsome epidemic disease." The fetid air is foul with the noisome exhalations of many generations of pestiferous people. It is one sink of concentrated malaria--a reeking hot bed of infection. The services of supply are carried out with abominable carelessness: the kitchen is an abode of nastiness: the cooking is performed by repulsive looking convicts in greasy rags who plunge their dirty arms deep into the seething mess of soup which they bail out into buckets, a malodorous compound of the colour and consistency of the mortar used in building a wall. [17] See ante, pp. 159 sqq.