THE COLONY
27
stretch their legs and relieve themselves only at night, when it was
impossible to tell what part of the country they were in. For all but
the last day of the trip, they had been chained together wrist to wrist;
the chains had not been unfastened even when they were let out to
relieve themselves. It proved embarrassing; though all had been trans–
ported to prison before, they had never been subjected to such indig–
nity. Thus chained, they had been unable to tend to their needs all at
once, and some had had to stand and wait, hiding their disgust, while
the rest squatted, or turned aside to avoid wetting or befouling one
another. The administration had determined that terror was best
approached through humiliation, and humiliation, through the viola–
tion of cleanliness. On the last day the van had made many stops, and
only then were the chains struck as the party leaders were removed,
one by one, each apparently to a separate jail. Thus the original
group of some forty had been reduced until Satya was alone, borne
to his own destination. His wrist was still manacled; but as there was
no one beside him to whom he could be shackled, the free end of the
long, empty chain had been fastened to a hook in the wall of the van.
It was obviously prison count.r;y; and this, one might as well sup–
pose, was an experimental prison. From the length of the journey and
from what he had tasted of the air, feeling it growing rarer and colder
on the way, he gathered that they had penetrated to the Northern
Foothills. But he was not satisfied merely to know in what province
or section he found himself.
As
he had been cut off completely from
contact with the world, he felt it might lessen his isolation to know
exactly where he was, for then he would still be defining his life
with reference to his country and his people. Therefore, he set about
imagining a landscape suitable to experimental prisons; and bearing
in mind that they were far North, and yet not actually in mountain
country, and that, furthermore, the administration would prefer to
keep him in a sparsely populated region, he concluded that the jail
was situated somewhere in the forest of Kananda. At once he remem–
bered the river that bordered the forest on the south and that ran
through the mountain town of Achalabad, which lay, he judged, some
thirty miles to the east. It was from this town that he had set out,
several times in his youth, to climb the northern ranges.
His decision concerning his whereabouts was, he knew, no better
grounded than the one whereby skeptics, in their dying years, allowed
themselves to believe in immortality. It is the present in which they
have grown weak, and not the futur.:: that concerns them; and their
belief in the afterlife is but a means of insuring and strengthening the
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