Little Dorrit | Page 3

and rattling of vicious
drums, Marseilles, a fact to be strongly smelt and tasted, lay broiling in
the sun one day. In Marseilles that day there was a villainous prison. In
one of its chambers, so repulsive a place that even the obtrusive stare
blinked at it, and left it to such refuse of reflected light as it could find
for itself, were two men. Besides the two men, a notched and disfigured
bench, immovable from the wall, with a draught-board rudely hacked
upon it with a knife, a set of draughts, made of old buttons and soup
bones, a set of dominoes, two mats, and two or three wine bottles. That
was all the chamber held, exclusive of rats and other unseen vermin, in
addition to the seen vermin, the two men.
It received such light as it got through a grating of iron bars fashioned
like a pretty large window, by means of which it could be always
inspected from the gloomy staircase on which the grating gave. There
was a broad strong ledge of stone to this grating where the bottom of it
was let into the masonry, three or four feet above the ground. Upon it,
one of the two men lolled, half sitting and half lying, with his knees
drawn up, and his feet and shoulders planted against the opposite sides
of the aperture. The bars were wide enough apart to admit of his
thrusting his arm through to the elbow; and so he held on negligently,
for his greater ease.
A prison taint was on everything there. The imprisoned air, the

imprisoned light, the imprisoned damps, the imprisoned men, were all
deteriorated by confinement. As the captive men were faded and
haggard, so the iron was rusty, the stone was slimy, the wood was
rotten, the air was faint, the light was dim. Like a well, like a vault, like
a tomb, the prison had no knowledge of the brightness outside, and
would have kept its polluted atmosphere intact in one of the spice
islands of the Indian ocean.
The man who lay on the ledge of the grating was even chilled. He
jerked his great cloak more heavily upon him by an impatient
movement of one shoulder, and growled, 'To the devil with this
Brigand of a Sun that never shines in here!'
He was waiting to be fed, looking sideways through the bars that he
might see the further down the stairs, with much of the expression of a
wild beast in similar expectation. But his eyes, too close together, were
not so nobly set in his head as those of the king of beasts are in his, and
they were sharp rather than bright--pointed weapons with little surface
to betray them. They had no depth or change; they glittered, and they
opened and shut. So far, and waiving their use to himself, a clockmaker
could have made a better pair. He had a hook nose, handsome after its
kind, but too high between the eyes by probably just as much as his
eyes were too near to one another. For the rest, he was large and tall in
frame, had thin lips, where his thick moustache showed them at all, and
a quantity of dry hair, of no definable colour, in its shaggy state, but
shot with red. The hand with which he held the grating (seamed all over
the back with ugly scratches newly healed), was unusually small and
plump; would have been unusually white but for the prison grime. The
other man was lying on the stone floor, covered with a coarse brown
coat.
'Get up, pig!' growled the first. 'Don't sleep when I am hungry.'
'It's all one, master,' said the pig, in a submissive manner, and not
without cheerfulness; 'I can wake when I will, I can sleep when I will.
It's all the same.'
As he said it, he rose, shook himself, scratched himself, tied his brown

coat loosely round his neck by the sleeves (he had previously used it as
a coverlet), and sat down upon the pavement yawning, with his back
against the wall opposite to the grating.
'Say what the hour is,' grumbled the first man.
'The mid-day bells will ring--in forty minutes.' When he made the little
pause, he had looked round the prison-room, as if for certain
information.
'You are a clock. How is it that you always know?'
'How can I say? I always know what the hour is, and where I am. I was
brought in here at night, and out of a boat, but I know where I am. See
here! Marseilles harbour;' on his knees on the pavement, mapping it all
out with a swarthy forefinger; 'Toulon (where the galleys are), Spain
over there, Algiers over there. Creeping away