Shroud and Coffin Prison.

Hastings Standard, Issue 216, 9 January 1897, Page 4

Shroud and Coffin Prison.

V, r?SE THAN TURKISH HORROR.

One need not waste any more ink and rhetoric on the cruelty of the Sultan of Turkey. In the way of diabolical torture Abdul Hamid Khan has nothing in his entire territory that compares with a prison mantained by a so-called civilised country of Europe. Entombed in a grim castle on the outskirts of Lisbon, hoping for death to release them, are the most miserable men on earth. They are the inmates of a prison of perpetual silence ; their prison garb is a shroud : their coffins face them in their cells ; they know that everything is being done to deprive them of reason, and they wait from day to day wondering if their release will come by death or insanity. The unfortunates have been sentenced to penal servitude in the Portuguese criminal colonies of Africa. But before they are allowed to go they are forced to serve eight years in the Lisbon fortress. It is doubtful if any one of these prisoners has ever lived through the allotted eight years. Two, or at most three, is the limit. At the end of that time they go mad and disappear. The deportation at the end of eight years is therefore a joke a grim little pleasantry on the part of the judge. The construction of the fortress which is built in the form of a wheel ; the unbroken silence of the prison life ; the stealthy tread of the attendants, who creep about in felt slippers, all work together to deprive the unfortunate of his reason. The corridors, piled tier on tier, five storeys high, extend out from the centre like the spokes of a wheel. Within the cells, like sentryboxes, stands a coffin for each prisoner. There is always an average of five hundred prisoners in the fortress. Once a day, at a certain hour, the cell doors are unlocked, and the half thousand hopeless wretches, in different degrees of madness, march out. They are clad in shrouds, once white, but now begrimed with prison dirt. Thenfaces are concealed by masks, for it is part of the hideous punishment that they may not look upon the faces of their fellow-prisoners. Once they are outside the cells an attendant closes the doors with a resounding click. This daily clicking of the locks is the only sound that intrudes upon their lives of unbroken silence. They may not exchange one glance of sympathy at their daily meeting. All that the convict sees is a throng of shrouded creatures, like himself, horribly grotesque, noiselessly making their way over the prison stones. The click of door after door is the only sound. The tread of their naked feet along the corridors gives back no sound as they make their way to the " exercise triangles." which are a unique feature of this prison. They take the place of a prison yard, as a convict here never draws a breath of pure air. Clad in shrouds and masks, the lonely men are marched out under the escort of guards to the " triangles," six or seven prisoners at a time, and left to pace up and down them for one hour. This march must continue uninterrupted till the hour is up, no halts being permitted. Should two of these miserable* ones draw near each other theywould be warned apart by the sharp crack of a bullet, perilously near their ears. The Sultan of Turkey, the Shah of Persia, the Ameer of Afghanistan, and all the other Oriental potentates who beguile their leisure hours in devising tortures for political offenders, cannot boast of reducing their enemies to such pitiable human wrecks as King Carlos of Portugal does. How most of them look the world will never know, hut the few who have, by special favor, been allowed to take off their masks before travellers were ghastly wrecks of men, pallid and shrunken, hollow-eyed and twisted of mouth. About a year ago King Carlos visited the principal countries of Europe with a view of bringing a few modern ideas into his little dilapidated HGB by 100-mile kingdom. The prison of silence has been holding its average of five hundred unfortunates ever since. So much of the Imperial and Royal kissing that punctuated Dom Carlos' visits to his brother sovereigns failed in its enobling effects.

It is probable that Portugal is ranked with the civilised countries of the world, despite the fact that she still retains a mediaeval prison, has a crown worth £1,600,000, and 110 highways. Queen Amelie prides herself on being a high priestess of new womanhood. She studied medicine to make professions the thing among the ladies of the Court circle at Lisbon. She took X-ray photographs of the ladies-in-waiting to show them the errors of tight-lacing. And she took King Carlos' corpulence in hand and undertook to establish his waist-line, a thing that all the King's doctors and all the King's tailors had failed to do. Yet the grim grey fertress on the outskirts of the capital has never appealed to her passion for reform.