The place was without life. Yet it seemed to throb with life. Peter half expected to find people inside the long galleries of the prison buildings, though he knew that there could be no living person in such a place of horrors. The door opening to the inner guardroom was also down, a thing of planks strapped together with iron bars. It lay askew across the stone threshold, and Peter walked over its side. It gave out a dull, hollow sound, which set the echoes going through the long inner galleries of the cell-wings. A vile odor assailed him as he stepped inside, and he shivered. He knew this place well. There were broken desks here, and gun-racks on the walls had been ripped from their supports. It was here that he had been taken the morning after his father had been cut down by the Cossack before the post-house. And Peter saw again in his mind’s eye the commandant with the gold bars on his shoulders, he heard again the careless questions snapped at him. Then he saw himself, a terrified little boy, led down the long gallery and thrust into a dark cell. He pushed on now into the gallery with its battered cell doors lying half inside and half outside the cells, some swinging crazily on bent hinges, some partly burned and lying in bits of charred wood, others splintered and their fragments strewn along the stone-floored passage. His feet made dull echoes. There was a sound of frightened things scampering into dark holes before him. And to Peter it seemed that there were thousands of men in the place—men who peered out at him derisively and gave long hooting laughs at him. It was colder inside the prison than outside in the clean air—a dark, dank, penetrating cold combined with the sickly smell of an old cage in which frozen white shoots of growing vegetation killed and preserved by the cold glimmered uncannily in the rank air. He found the cell that had been his—sixth on the right side. The big door was swung inward. The stone benches inside were black and polished with years of dirt and years of being sat upon. The stained log walls were covered with thousands of marks which recorded days and years spent in the cell by exiles. Among these rows of time-keeping scratches were also etched words of hate and messages of comfort and the scribbled jeers of men who had made a jest of going from such a place to the execution yard. One line on the wall caught Peter’s eye under the searching beam of his pocket flash light. “God curse Kirsakoff,” Peter read. The letter had been formed by his own boyish fingers with a nail—fingers stiff with cold. He laughed at the sight of it now, and slapped the pistol on his hip under his greatcoat. His laugh came back to him multiplied a hundred times from the cells of the long galleries stretching away in the darkness. The echoes sounded like a scornful chorus from ghosts.