but were managed by a gendarme officer named Captain Nikólin. who bad been sent out from St. Petersburg for this particular duty, and who was at the head of a carefully selected prison guard of 140 gendarmes. The political prisons had also their free command, which at the time of our visit consisted of twelve or fifteen men and women, who had finished their terms of probation and were living in little huts or cabins of their own on the outskirts of the Lower Diggings. All of these facts were known to us long before we reached the mines, and we shaped our course in accordance with them.
The objects that we had in view at Kará were, first, to go through the common-criminal prisons and see the criminals actually at work in the mines: secondly, to make the acquaintance of the political convicts of the free command: and thirdly, to visit the political prison and see how the condemned revolutionists lived, even if we were not permitted to talk with them. That we should succeed in attaining the first of these objects I felt confident, of the second I was not at all sure, and of the third I had little hope: but I determined to try hard for all. What instructions Major Pótulof had received with regard to us I did not know; but he treated us with great cordiality, asked no awkward questions, and when, on the day after our arrival. I asked permission to visit the prisons and mines, granted it without the least apparent surprise or hesitation, ordered out his horses and dróshky, and said that it would give him great pleasure to accompany us.
It is not my purpose to describe minutely all of the prisons in Kará that we were permitted to inspect, but I will sketch hastily the two that seemed to me to be typical, respectively, of the worst class and of the best.
The Ust Kará prison, which, in point of sanitary condition and overcrowding, is perhaps the worst place of confinement in the whole Kará valley, is situated on low, marshy ground in the outskirts of the penal settlement of the same
