A voice said mechanically from the vicinity of my feet: "_II vous faut
prendre la douche_"--I stared stupidly. The spectre was poised before me;
its averted eyes contemplated the window. "Take your bath," it added as
an afterthought, in English--"Come with me." It turned suddenly. It
hurried to the doorway. I followed. Its rapid deadly doll-like hands shut
and skillfully locked the doors in a twinkling. "Come," its voice said.

It hurried before me down two dirty flights of narrow mutilated stairs.
It turned left, and passed through an open door.

I found myself in the wet sunless air of morning.

To the right it hurried, following the wall of the building. I pursued it
mechanically. At the corner, which I had seen from the window upstairs,
the barbed-wire fence eight feet in height began. The thing paused,
produced a key and unlocked a gate. The first three or four feet of wire
swung inward. He entered. I after him.

In a flash the gate was locked behind me, and I was following along a
wall at right angles to the first. I strode after the thing. A moment
before I had been walking in a free world: now I was again a prisoner.
The sky was still over me, the clammy morning caressed me; but walls of
wire and stone told me that my instant of freedom had departed. I was in
fact traversing a lane no wider than the gate; on my left, barbed-wire
separated me from the famous _cour_ in which _les femmes se promenent_--a
rectangle about 50 feet deep and 200 long, with a stone wall at the
further end of it and otherwise surrounded by wire;--on my right, grey
sameness of stone, the _ennui_ of the regular and the perpendicular, the
ponderous ferocity of silence....