There were twenty-two steps altogether from the courtyard of the goal up to the cells. I had got into the habit of counting those steps.
Made them seem shorter, or easier. Anyway I had got into the habit of counting. And at the fourteenth I stopped, done. Because I could go no further, I lowered myself onto the step above me and took stock of my surroundings.
At the foot of the stairs, barely visible in the gloom, sat the sentry steel-helmeted, knees wide apart, rifle and bayonet across his knees.
Silent, unintelligent, unfriendly. Beyond him a small courtyard about
thirty yards square. Round the courtyard ran a high prison wall-sheer and made unscalable by five or six rows of loose-piled bricks balanced twenty feet up on its top.
Above my head, all along the balcony which ran from the top of the stairs round three sides of the ancient block of cells, the darkness was restless with the small sounds of men who slept neither comfortably nor well.
And at my feet, also on the staircase, lying doubled up over three or four steps, sprawled a half -naked soldier an Argyll,
I recognized from his cap which, last of his possessions, he wore even at night.
