Ferdynand Antoni Ossendowski

“ This in turn was quickly broken by the changing of the guard with its accompanying calls of the soldiers and keepers, the rattle of grounding arms and the rhythm of marching feet. As soon as quiet once more reigned, the appeal of Mironoff was heard.
"Shilo!" No answer, and again the signals, frightened and quick:
"Shilo! Shilo!" But the condemned sent no reply.
"Everything is finished," moaned Boitsoff in a dismal voice. "God have mercy on his soul!"
The words of the old prisoner were mingled with the frantic knocks of Mironoff, repeatedly calling to his prison friend. ”

“ The same process of undermining the human strength goes on in prison, where man, at the critical moment, breaks up in the torrent of despair and slips down into the irresistible current that sweeps him along to an unknown deep. Will it be suicide, an explosion of hate or sheer, engulfing madness? No one knows nor can anyone foretell the answer.
I remember with oppressing vividness just such a period in my own prison life, when despair fastened itself upon me and I felt with every fibre of my soul the utter uselessness of my life. ”

“ EVERYWHERE that men and women meet, be it in great and throbbing cities, on the solitary islands of a distant sea or even in those prison wards where night and day the clang of chains is heard—everywhere the little god with bow and quiver silently and persistently stalks his human quarry. He looses his shafts, regardless of whether they are to be messengers of happiness and joy or are to carry torture and pain. ”

“ Lightning constantly rent the black mantle of clouds that covered the sky; thunder shook the prison buildings and emphasized their gloom; terror seemed to have shackled nature; a fearful expectancy filled the souls of the prisoners.
The Eagle gazed up at the black sky, watching the lightning that shredded it, and turned away to pace up and down his cell. Without realizing it, he tramped ever quicker and quicker, like a wild beast in its cage. Suddenly he stopped and looked out of the side window in his corner cell, which was half boarded up. ”

“ Throughout the prison the men rose, stretched and washed, accompanying it all with a ceaseless stream of monstrous oaths. No one muttered a prayer; no one made the sign of the Holy Cross.
As Drujenin rose, he came to the middle of the room with his clanking irons and there stopped to attach them by a leather thong to his belt. He was a man of thirty years, short but strong and graceful; not what one would call good-looking but having bold, hazel eyes, which seemed never to wink and thus not only gave to his face a dreamy character but an impression of the watchfulness of a wild animal. ”

“ At this time, when the prison walls separated me from life with all its noise and struggle, when I felt myself absolutely alone, I was surrounded by unknown, invisible beings rising up out of the unexplored recesses of my soul, who spoke with me, advising and instructing me. I realized then what extraordinary, invisible powers are lodged within the transient human body, what treasury might be obtained from these powers, were they not lulled to sleep by the opiate of modern life. ”

“ When he rose up and fastened his gaze upon the holy emblem, his eyes were full of such a faith and thankfulness that I felt the soul of this criminal, who had passed through the torture of awaiting death, was at this moment at the feet of God, the Supreme Judge. As he held his eyes steadily on the Cross, he wept and repeated only one word:
"Life ... Life!"
The convicts watched their chained companion, who saw and heard nothing around him in his earnest, ardent prayer, and the fires of emotion and joy lighted their eyes. ”

“ I had no more than reached it, when, from out of the deep silence of the hours before the day, there suddenly came along the walls a new rush of hurried signals.
"It is I, Shilo. I am amnestied! Really amnestied! ... When the guard was changing, I was taken to the chancery to be given the news of a telegram from the Governor, saying that my sentence had been changed to life imprisonment. I have only just returned to my cell. Amnestied. ... Life!"
Among the prisoners a buzz like that in a hive commenced, full of emotion, joy and thankfulness. ”

“ The panic-stricken crowd scattered in every direction, scurrying over the Place in front of the station, sheltering in the school building hard by or fleeing into the side streets. Two bodies remained behind on the pavement. One was that of Sophie Volkenstein, this woman who yearned for the freedom of a people and who went down without a shadow or spot on her conscience, disheartened and disgusted with vacillating officials, who sacrificed everything sacred to the greed of a career. She fell as she had lived—fighting in the front rank. ”

“ The magnificent beast of prey lies in stately repose with his powerful paws quietly resting in front of him and with his head poised as proud as a king, his bright, yellow eyes looking off into space without blinking and seeing neither the bars of his cage, the keeper nor the crowds of spectators staring in idle worship. When his pupils, looking like black rifts in the yellow beryls, happen to light on a man before him, one has the impression that he looks right through the human being and sees beyond him the vast range of the forest, to which he silently and deeply longs to return. ”

“ In the course of a few weeks Samsonoff resigned and returned to Harbin with his wife, who was tired of the jungle, where my ovens struggled with the virgin forest and devoured the bodies of the wood giants just as an extraneous accident devoured the life of Kazik. The human heart can be hard, indifferent and callous; and this is perhaps one unconsciously influencing reason why I do not like big human masses. I found new assistants and our automaton continued to devour. ”

“ MY MOTHER
THE prison destroys a man, poisoning him slowly day by day and hour by hour. Its action is like that of a swelling river in spring, when it imperceptibly carries away bit after bit of its covering of ice. The observer on its banks will only understand what has happened when the ice, which has thus been softened from the top and undermined from the bottom, suddenly breaks up with a roar and a splash, churning the whole stream into mush and foam, till the current seizes the disintegrating fields and carries them down to the all-devouring sea. ”

“ As the skilful miner quickly executed my command, the pyroxylin exploded with a deafening roar and threw from the shaft opening, as though it were the muzzle of a great cannon, clouds of dust, vapour and gas intermingled with small stones and earth.
"That is only a start," thundered Rusoff. "Come out or in five minutes we shall destroy the entrance to the gallery. Be quick, you badgers!"
Our strategy proved successful, for soon we heard a voice from the gallery and negotiations began.
"Who are you?" was the first word from our invisible cliff dwellers.
"We are for the moment ourselves. ”

“ In the corner near the door there stands a big iron bucket, the parasha, the worst torture of the criminal prison. On the wooden benches along the walls are sleeping about one hundred of the most important members of the colony of condemned, for these are the so-called "Ivans" or old, hardened habitual criminals, men who for years have been intimately acquainted with all the prisons of Russia, with the stupefying cold of the Siberian winters, with the katorga or penal colony of enforced hard labour, with Zerentoui, Akatoui and Onor. ”

“ You are the victims of our struggle for the right,
For the liberty, the glory and the honour of the nation.
Not liking this sympathetic enthusiasm or fearing an attack, the gendarmes dispersed the crowd with their swords. Then just a little farther on, near the market, we were received in quite another fashion by a gathering of the scum of the town, who were evidently acting as "supes" for the monarchists, and loosed at us a volley of curses and abuse.
"Death to the revolutionaries! To the gallows with them! To the wall!" ”

“ Such an experience is only normal in the life of a prisoner and explains why men who have been sentenced to long terms do not, for the most part, begin to work of their own will, for they instinctively realize that the end of the period of their exclusion from the life of the State and of society is still so far away that the one single thought is simply to wait for it to come and there is no reason to begin to prepare for it through work. This is the most demoralizing influence of the prison, since a man after this lethargy rarely knows how, when he is set free, to return to normal life. ”

“ Many of them were simply curses and oaths, others were love-verses, while one inscription, made with a sharp-pointed instrument in the plaster, arrested my attention and roused within me some indistinct but unbalancing thoughts. Some inmate of the cell, unknown and now dead, had graven in this plaster his final message of despair to the world:
"In an hour's time I shall be shot. ... I shall disappear, but my written words shall remain. After all, what is a human life worth?" ”

“ Samsonoff will not believe what I said and suspects the worst." As he finished, he pulled off his cap and threw it on the ground like an impetuous boy.
"You talked about Madame Vera?" I asked.
He was too much roused and irritated to show astonishment over my question and answered without hesitancy:
"Yes, everyone can love or hate! The only thing is not to act basely, sinfully or treacherously. Nothing threatens Samsonoff. He has also but to work, to study and to struggle, and he will surely reach the great, broad highroad of life before ever I do. Then his wife will not leave him. ”

“ There were the battle of Sha Ho, the unsuccessful operations of Grippenberg, the requests of Kuropatkin for the formation of the third army and the loss of this at Moukden, the capitulation of the powerful fortress of Port Arthur and finally the mad voyage of Admirals Rozhestvensky and Niebogatoff with a fleet of old and weak men-o'-war from the Baltic to the fatal Straits of Tsushima—all these stirred up terror and awe in the more thoughtful elements of Russian society. ”

“ Though I am a man of action and have seen war eye to eye, fighting for causes which I could comprehend and for which I could take the risk of the sacrifice, I cannot help being moved when I see masses of men flung into the jaws of death without this comprehension of, and sympathy with, the purposes of the war, which is often waged for material aims, for Mammon alone, asking from men victims without number and a sea of blood and giving them in return only wounds and crippled bodies for life, too often without the arms with which Nature has provided them to meet their struggle for existence. ”

“ Such a demoralizing and degrading influence has the life of the prison in the common cells! Their inmates are often brought to a state of numb indifference to everything, to a brooding, morbid silence which smothers the mental faculties; or they suddenly burst forth in some violent explosion and then are not capable of restraining their anger, completely forgetting their culture and the dignity of man, created in the likeness of God. ”

“ Then it is a fact! I am as one tainted or as a leper. Men are afraid of me. And, allied by such thoughts as these, despair took a still stronger hold on my soul. I saw only misery before me. Who would give me work under such systematized persecution by the police? It seemed as though an unscalable wall had been set across my path of life.
That evening, while I was scanning the newspapers in the study of Professor Zaleski, I saw an advertisement to the effect that a certain Mr. Rass was starting a newspaper and desired some additional assistants on his staff. ”

“ The Soviet leaders also have not given this understanding, they who woke and duped the Russian soul with words pointing to liberty, only to shackle Russia even the more strongly with the chains of illegality and to deprive the nation of its last glimpse of hope, its faith in God, and to push it over the brink into the pit of hellish torture, the story of which is the most tragic page in the annals of humanity down through all the long centuries of recorded history. ”

“ When the skeleton iron door closed with a dull noise and a rattle behind us, a crushing presentiment, an indescribable longing fastened itself upon our hearts.
Some guards, armed with revolvers and swords, were stationed about the prison yard, where a group of prisoners were carrying big buckets filled with dishwater. In an exercise cage, which had been built in the centre of the yard, a prisoner was shuffling up and down with a heavy, swaying tread, induced by the irons on his feet, which clanked at every movement. ”

“ After Nowakowski had read the proclamation which published to the prison this disheartening news, he swore energetically and persistently and completely lost his usual good humour, walking up and down for whole hours from one corner of the cell to the other, and muttering:
"Fool! Fool!"
"Who is a fool?" I finally asked him.
"I am," he answered and stopped right in front of me, as I looked at him in astonishment "I am," he repeated with emphasis and conviction, "because it was I myself who built the criminal prison over in Pristan and now I am to be locked up in it! ”