“A little bamboo door opened, and I rose to go toward it. But oh! who can describe my sensations! shackled like a common felon, in the care of hangmen, the offscouring of the country, turned like a dog into his kennel, my wife, my dear family, left to suffer alone all the rudeness such wretches are capable of. The worst, however, was yet to come; for making the best of my way up the high steps, I was ushered into the grand apartment. Horror of horrors, what a sight! never to my dying day shall I forget the scene: a dim lamp in the midst, just making darkness visible, and discovering to my horrified gaze sixty or seventy wretched objects, some in long rows made fast in the stocks, some strung on long poles, some simply fettered; but all sensible of a new acquisition of misery in the approach of a new prisoner. Stupefied, I stopped to gaze till, goaded on, I proceeded toward the further end, when I again halted. A new and unexpected sight met my eyes. Till now I had been kept in ignorance of the fate of my companions. A long row of white objects, stretched on the floor in a most crowded situation, revealed to me, however, but too well their sad state, and I was again urged forward. Poor old Rodgers, wishing to retain the end of the bamboo, made way for me to be placed alongside of Mr. Judson. ‘We all hoped you would have escaped, you were so long coming,’ was the first friendly salutation I had yet received; but alas, it was made by friends whose sympathy was now unavailable.”
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE LET-MA-YOON PRISON.]
The following description of the interior of this jail is given by an English fellow-prisoner of Mr. Judson:
“The only articles of furniture the place contained were these: First, and most prominent, was a gigantic row of stocks, similar in its construction to that formerly used in England, but now nearly extinct; though dilapidated specimens may still be seen in some of the marketplaces of our own country towns. It was capable of accommodating more than a dozen occupants, and like a huge alligator opened and shut its jaws with a loud snap upon its prey. Several smaller reptiles, interesting varieties of the same species, lay basking around this monster, each holding by the leg a pair of hapless victims consigned to its custody. These were heavy logs of timber, bored with holes to admit the feet, and fitted with wooden pins to hold them fast. In the centre of the apartment was placed a tripod, holding a large earthen cup filled with earth-oil, to be used as a lamp during the night-watches; and lastly, a simple but suspicious-looking piece of machinery whose painful uses it was my fate to test before many hours had elapsed. It was merely a long bamboo suspended from the roof by a rope at each end, and worked by blocks or pulleys, to raise or depress it at pleasure.
“Before me, stretched on the floor, lay forty or fifty hapless wretches, whose crimes or misfortunes had brought them into this place of torment. They were all nearly naked, and the half-famished features and skeleton frames of many of them too plainly told the story of their protracted sufferings. Very few were without chains, and some had one or both feet in the stocks besides. A sight of such squalid wretchedness can hardly be imagined. Silence seemed to be the order of the day; perhaps the poor creatures were so engrossed with their own misery that they hardly cared to make any remarks on the intrusion of so unusual an inmate as myself.
“If the _ensemble_ be difficult to portray, the stench was absolutely indescribable, for it was not like anything which exists elsewhere in creation. I will therefore give the facts, and leave the reader’s nose to understand them by a synthetic course of reasoning—if it can.
“The prison had never been washed, nor even swept, since it was built. So I was told, and have no doubt it was true; for, besides the ocular proof from its present condition, it is certain no attempt was made to cleanse it during my subsequent tenancy of eleven months. This gave a kind of fixedness or permanency to the fetid odors, until the very floors and walls were saturated with them, and joined in emitting the pest. Putrid remains of castaway animal and vegetable stuff, which needed no broom to make it _move on_—the stale fumes from thousands of tobacco-pipes—the scattered ejections of the pulp and liquid from their everlasting betel, and other nameless abominations, still more disgusting, which strewed the floor—and if to this be added the exudations from the bodies of a crowd of never-washed convicts, encouraged by the thermometer at 100°, in a den almost without ventilation—is it possible to say what it _smelt_ like?
“As might have been expected from such a state of things, the place was teeming with creeping vermin to such an extent that very soon reconciled me to the plunder of the greater portion of my dress.”