There were others who suffered with him in the barbaric prison-house. What he endured was no less, no more, than they were made to bear. Happy indeed were those whom death released from misery and anguish that tongue could never tell, nor pen describe. Hell itself, as pictured by maddest brain of the most fiendish fanatic, could not have shown greater resources in the way of physical and mental torture. The Black Hole of Calcutta lacked many of the special horrors of the inner den in which the prophet's prisoners were herded during all the awful hours of night. The bloodstained walls of the Tower of London, if walls could speak, whispering of the rack, the thumbscrew, and the boot, might tell indeed of sharper anguish, sooner over. The secret history of the Spanish Inquisition, if published, would reveal not less ingenuity--perhaps greater, in the refined subtleties of cruelty. But the prison at Khartum excelled them all at least in one respect--the prolongation of the agony inflicted. Not for weeks or months, but for years, if life endured, the prisoner had to suffer. Wearing three sets of shackles, with an iron ring round his neck, to which was attached a heavy chain, Renshaw--the White Kaffir--the man of culture and social ease in London, but here the reviled unbeliever, when night came was thrust into a stone-walled room measuring some thirty feet each way. A large pillar, supporting the roof, reduced the space available. Two prisoners, in chains, were dying of smallpox in a corner; some thirty others, suffering from various diseases, lay about the floor, which reeked with filth and swarmed with vermin. A compound stench, sickening and over-powering, assailed the nostrils, and every moment this increased as more prisoners, and yet more, were driven in for the night. The groans of the sick, the screams of the mad, the curses of others as they fought fiercely for places against one or another of the walls, blended in awful tumult as the door was closed upon the darkness within. Yet again and again that door was opened, and more prisoners were crowded in; until, at last, they fought and bit and raved even for standing room. Night after night, for nearly four years, Renshaw, the man of delicate fibre and refined training, the son of Western civilization, lived through such scenes as these, amid incidental horrors of bestiality that cannot be set down. When the uproar in the prison attained exceptional violence, the guards threw back the doors, and lashed with their hide-whips at the heads and faces of the nearest prisoners, and every time that this occurred some of them, struggling to move back, fell to the ground, and were trampled under foot.