e name of the manager every time he came in or went
out. By him always stood a wild Scythian, armed with a spear, girt with a
sabre, and with a short bow and a quiver of short arrows hanging over his
back. Similar Scythians guarded the doorways, a pair of them to each door.
The slide by which the grain was lowered into the _ergastulum_, the other
slide by which the flour, coarse siftings and bran were hauled up, were
similarly guarded. Escape was made so difficult by these precautions that,
while I was there, no one escaped out of the three hundred wretches
confined in the _ergastulum_.

There we suffered sleepless nights in our hard bunks, under worn and
tattered quilts, tormented by every sort of vermin. Swarming with vermin
we toiled through the days, from the first hint of light to its last
glimmer, shivering in our ragged tunics, our bare feet numb on the chilly
pavements. We were cold, hungry, underfed on horribly revolting food,
reviled, abused, beaten and always smarting from old welts or new weals of
the whip-lashes.

It was all a nightmare: the toil, the lashings, if our monotonous walk
around our mill, eight men to a mill, two to each bar, did not suit the
notions of the room-overseer; the dampness, the cold, the vermin, the pain
of our unhealed bruises, the scanty food and its disgusting uneatableness.

The food seemed the worst feature of our misery. So, in fact, it appears
to have seemed to our despicable companions. Certainly, of the food they
complained more than of the toil, the cold, the vermin, the malignity of
the overseers or even of the barbarity of the Scythian guards. Anyhow
their fury at the quality of their food brought to me and Agathemer an
alleviation of our misery. For some hotheaded wretches, goaded beyond
endurance, jerked the bars of their mill from their sockets and with them
felled, beat to death and even brained the cook and his two assistants.

After their corpses had been removed, the floor swabbed up and the
murderers turned over to the gloating Scythians to be done to death by
impalement, Scythian fashion, with all the tortures Scythian ferocity
could devise, the manager went from cellar to cellar, all through the
_ergastulum_, enquiring if any prisoner could cook. No one volunteered,
and, when he questioned more than a few, everyone denied any knowledge of
cookery.

A second time he made the tour of his domain, promising any cook a warm
tunic, a bunk with a thick mattress and