The Stratagem and Other Stories

narrative. He only remarked, “Then you were not guillo- tined?” “I was not, sir,” retorted the other passionately. “At that time capital punishment was never inflicted in France, though not officially abrogated. I may say,” he added, with the pride of a legislator, “that my action lent considerable strength to the agitation which led to its reintroduction. “No, sir, I was not guillotined. I was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment in Devil’s Island.” He shud- dered. “Can you imagine that accursed Isle? Can your fancy paint one tithe of its horror? Can nightmare itself shadow that inferno, that limbo of the damned? My lan- guage is strong, sir; but no language can depict that hell. I will spare you the description. Sand, vermin, crocodiles, venomous snakes, miasma, mosquitoes, fe- ver, filth, toil, jaundice, malaria, starvation, foul under- growth, weedy swamps breathing out death, hideous and bloated trees of poison, themselves already poi- soned by their earth, heat unendurable, insufferable, intolerable, unbearable (as the Daily Telegraph said at the time of the Dreyfus case), heat continuous and sti- fling, no breeze but the pestilential stench of the lagoon, heat that turned the skin into a raging sea of irritation to which the very stings of the mosquitoes and centipedes came as a relief, the interminable task of the day be- neath the broiling sun, the lash on every slightest infrac- tion of the harsh prison rules, or even of the laws of po- liteness toward our warders, men only one degree less damned than we ourselves—all this was nothing. The only amusement of the governors of such a place is cru- elty; and their own discomfort makes them more ingen- ious than all the inquisitors of Spain, than Arabs in their religious frenzy, than Burmans and Kachens and Shans in their Buddhist hatred of all living men, than even the Chinese in their cold lust of cruelty. The governor was a profound psychologist; no corner of the mind that he did not fathom, so as to devise a means of twisting it to tor- ture.