The larger dungeons of the Keep are entered beneath the stairway that leads to the parade-ground from the level of the crypt we have just visited. These lower places of confinement have been sadly modernised, white-washed, and have all the appearance of respectable wine-cellars, lit by electric light. In these once gloomy chambers, deep down below the level of the ground, stood the rack; the cries of victims would not be heard beyond the massive walls. This instrument of torture was an open frame of solid oak about three feet high. The prisoner was laid within it, on the bare ground, his wrists and ankles being tied to rollers at each extremity. By means of levers these rollers were moved in opposite directions and the body of the prisoner was thereby raised to the level of the frame. While his body was thus suspended he was questioned, and if his replies came tardily a turn or two of the rollers, which threatened to pull his joints from their sockets, was considered necessary to extract from the sufferer any information desired. In this place, and in this way, Guy Fawkes was racked after Gunpowder Plot, and, between the periods of torture, was confined in a small cell called Little Ease, which was constructed so skilfully that the captive could neither lie down nor stand up with any satisfaction, but was compelled to exist there in a cramped and stooping posture. This miserable cell lay between the dungeon containing the rack and the great dungeon under the crypt of St. John’s Chapel. Though the formidable iron-studded door of Little Ease, with its ingenious system of locks and bolts, is still to be seen, the cell itself has been broken through to give entrance to the black vault beyond. Yet even to-day, in spite of foolish “improvements,” some idea of the power of Little Ease to administer suffering can be gained. In this, at one time, circumscribed space, Guy Fawkes spent his last weeks, with no fresh air to breathe and no glimmer of light to cheer. The gloomy dungeon, to which Little Ease now gives access, under St. John’s crypt, was the foulest and blackest of all the Tower cells. Even now it is a place of horror, though an attempt has been made to enlarge the single window, high up on the eastern side, and admit a little more light. Hundreds of Jews were shut up here in King John’s time, charged, as has already been stated in the previous chapter, with tampering with the coinage of the realm. No light of any kind entered the place in those days, the earthen floor was carefully kept damp for greater inconvenience, the air was poisonous, and the place was at all times infested with rats. This cell rivals in horror the Black Hole of Calcutta, and in it men were, to use a Meredithian expression, chilled in subterranean sunlessness. In the basement chambers, to the west of this dungeon and of the torture chamber, a well has, within recent years, been discovered, together with a secret passage leading towards the moat and the river.