In
The Porch, As Might Have Been In That Of Pilate Or Herod, Were A Number
Of Official Palanquins, And Many Officials And Servants Of The Mandarin
With Red-Crowned Hats Turned Up From Their Faces, And Privates Of The
City Guard, Mean And Shabby Persons.
One of these, for a kum-sha of
course, took us, not through the closed and curtained doors, but
Along
some passages, from which we passed through a circular brickwork tunnel
to the front of the judgment seat at which all the inmates of the
Naam-Hoi prison may expect sooner or later to be tried. My nerves were
rather shaken with what I had seen, and I trembled as a criminal might
on entering this chamber of horror.
In brief, the judgment-seat is a square hall, open at one end, with a
roof supported on three columns. In the plan which I send, No. 1 is the
three pillars; No. 2, the instruments of torture ranged against the
wall; No. 3, four accused men wearing heavy chains, and kneeling with
their foreheads one inch from the ground, but not allowed to touch it.
These men are undergoing the mildest form of torture - protracted
kneeling without support in one position, with coarse sand under the
bare knees. No. 4 is a very old and feeble man, also kneeling, a
claimant in an ancient civil suit. No. 6 indicates a motley group of
notaries, servants, attendants, lictors, alas! The table (No. 5) is of
dark wood, covered with a shabby red cloth.
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