On an evening towards the end of August, in that year when Durrance came home blind from the Soudan, he sat in a corner of the enclosure watching the sun drop westwards towards the plain with an agony of anticipation. For however intolerable the heat and burden of the day, it was as nothing compared with the horrors which each night renewed. The moment of twilight came and with it Idris es Saier, the great negro of the Gawaamah tribe, and his fellow-gaolers.
"Into the House of Stone!" he cried.
Praying and cursing, with the sound of the pitiless whips falling perpetually upon the backs of the hindmost, the prisoners jostled and struggled at the narrow entrance to the prison house. Already it was occupied by some thirty captives, lying upon the swamped mud floor or supported against the wall in the last extremities of weakness and disease. Two hundred more were driven in at night and penned there till morning. The room was perhaps thirty feet square, of which four feet were occupied by a solid pillar supporting the roof. There was no window in the building; a few small apertures near the roof made a pretence of giving air, and into this foul and pestilent hovel the prisoners were packed, screaming and fighting. The door was closed upon them, utter darkness replaced the twilight, so that a man could not distinguish even the outlines of the heads of the neighbours who wedged him in.
Colonel Trench fought like the rest. There was a corner near the door which he coveted at that moment with a greater fierceness of desire than he had ever felt in the days when he had been free. Once in that corner, he would have some shelter from the blows, the stamping feet, the bruises of his neighbour's shackles; he would have, too, a support against which to lean his back during the ten interminable hours of suffocation.
"If I were to fall! If I were to fall!"
That fear was always with him when he was driven in at night. It worked in him like a drug producing madness. For if a man once went down amid that yelling, struggling throng, he never got up again-he was trampled out of shape. Trench had seen such victims dragged from the prison each morning; and he was a small man. Therefore he fought for his corner in a frenzy like a wild beast, kicking with his fetters, thrusting with his elbows, diving under this big man's arm, burrowing between two others, tearing at their clothes, using his nails, his fists, and even striking at heads with the chain which dangled from the iron ring about his neck. He reached the corner in the end, streaming with heat and gasping for breath; the rest of the night he would spend in holding it against all comers.
"If I were to fall!" he gasped. "O God, if I were to fall!" and he shouted aloud to his neighbour-for in that clamour nothing less than a shout was audible-"Is it you, Ibrahim?" and a like shout answered him, "Yes, Effendi."
Trench felt some relief. Between Ibrahim, a great tall Arab of the Hadendoas, and Trench, a friendship born of their common necessities had sprung up. There were no prison rations at Omdurman; each captive was dependent upon his own money or the charity of his friends outside. To Trench from time to time there came money from his friends, brought secretly into the prison by a native who had come up from Assouan or Suakin; but there were long periods during which no help came to him, and he lived upon the charity of the Greeks who had sworn conversion to the Mahdist faith, or starved with such patience as he could. There were times, too, when Ibrahim had no friend to send him his meal into the prison. And thus each man helped the other in his need. They stood side by side against the wall at night.
"Yes, Effendi, I am here," and groping with his hand in the black darkness, he steadied Trench against the wall.
A fight of even more than common violence was raging in an extreme corner of the prison, and so closely packed were the prisoners that with each advance of one combatant and retreat of the other, the whole jostled crowd swayed in a sort of rhythm, from end to end, from side to side. But they swayed, fighting to keep their feet, fighting even with their teeth, and above the din and noise of their hard breathing, the clank of their chains, and their imprecations, there rose now and then a wild sobbing cry for mercy, or an inhuman shriek, stifled as soon as uttered, which showed that a man had gone down beneath the stamping feet. Missiles, too, were flung across the prison, even to the foul earth gathered from the floor, and since none knew from what quarter they were flung, heads were battered against heads in the effort to avoid them. And all these things happened in the blackest darkness.
For two hours Trench stood in that black prison ringing with noise, rank with heat, and there were eight hours to follow before the door would be opened and he could stumble into the clean air and fall asleep in the zareeba. He stood upon tiptoe that he might lift his head above his fellows, but even so he could barely breathe, and the air he breathed was moist and sour. His throat was parched, his tongue was swollen in his mouth and stringy like a dried fig. It seemed to him that the imagination of God could devise no worse hell than the House of Stone on an August night in Omdurman. It could add fire, he thought, but only fire.
"If I were to fall!" he cried, and as he spoke his hell was made perfect, for the door was opened. Idris es Saier appeared in the opening.
"Make room," he cried, "make room," and he threw fire among the prisoners to drive them from the door. Lighted tufts of dried grass blazed in the darkness and fell upon the bodies of the prisoners. The captives were so crowded they could not avoid the missiles; in places, even, they could not lift their hands to dislodge them from their shoulders or their heads.
"Make room," cried Idris. The whips of his fellow-gaolers enforced his command, the lashes fell upon all within reach, and a little space was cleared within the door. Into that space a man was flung and the door closed again.
Trench was standing close to the door; in the dim twilight which came through the doorway he had caught a glimpse of the new prisoner, a man heavily ironed, slight of figure, and bent with suffering.
"He will fall," he said, "he will fall to-night. God! if I were to!" and suddenly the crowd swayed against him, and the curses rose louder and shriller than before.
The new prisoner was the cause. He clung to the door with his face against the panels, through the chinks of which actual air might come. Those behind plucked him from his vantage, jostled him, pressed him backwards that they might take his place. He was driven as a wedge is driven by a hammer, between this prisoner and that, until at last he was flung against Colonel Trench.
The ordinary instincts of kindness could not live in the nightmare of that prison house. In the daytime, outside, the prisoners were often drawn together by their bond of a common misery; the faithful as often as not helped the infidel. But to fight for life during the hours of darkness without pity or cessation was the one creed and practice of the House of Stone. Colonel Trench was like the rest. The need to live, if only long enough to drink one drop of water in the morning and draw one clean mouthful of fresh air, was more than uppermost in his mind. It was the only thought he had.