Note 1 — Chapter XXXVII · THE CONVICT MINES OF KARA.

He says (p. 229): “They never see the light of day, but work and sleep all the year round in the depths of the earth, extracting silver or quicksilver under the eyes of taskmasters, who have orders not to spare them. Iron gates guarded by sentries close the lodes, or streets, at the bottom of the shafts, and the miners are railed off from one another in gangs of twenty. They sleep within recesses hewn out of the rock—very kennels—into which they must creep on all fours.”