She gazed up at the door. And her heart broke. The women prisoners had their hair shaved off, she had heard. But she thought, too, of the joy she was bringing.

She knocked loudly on the door.

Some small portion of the door—for she was not significant enough to warrant opening the whole thing—was slowly eased open and a sharp face observed her. What type of a man it was who worked in such a place seemed clear at once from his crudely carved features and the grim, grey uniform that clothed him, from the great slab of a paw that pulled open the little door and the small, black eyes that crawled over her person, at once suspicious and speculative. He stood barring her way, but as Alice could see other people like herself gathered in a little huddle beyond she saw that the man only stood in her way because it pleased him to do so.

The door closed behind her and she stood in a tiled hallway, black-and-white squares beneath her feet, steps leading upwards to her left, a guards’ room to her right and another set of doors, closed, before her. Notices and signs every way she turned warned what she might do and what she might not do. Dire penalties were invoked. Were the men still flogged? Alice wondered. Or the women?

It was not so long ago they had been a penal colony.

The hall was uncomfortably crowded. A silent, shuffling, fidgeting crowd who stood about loosely or leaned against the wall scratching and picking at themselves. Their boots had holes in them and their heads were covered with shawls; they clutched sad little baskets of food close to their chests; they were reeling drunk. One—a young man in a torn shirt—held a Bible and murmured to himself; another—a youth with a lame leg—concealed a razor blade in his shoe and when the guards found it the boy was beaten and thrown onto the street. No one seemed surprised. No one watched. Alice was searched too, a giant of a man in a straining grey tunic with tiny staring black eyes and large callused hands who patted her roughly and thrust a hand inside her clothing and another up her skirt, turning her about this way and that as he pleased, laughing when she tried to stop him. No one seemed surprised. No one watched. The man smelled of damp earth and rotting food and stale sweat. When he had finished with Alice he thrust her away.

A window was cut into the wall of the guards’ room and here a third guard was stationed. Behind him a small wood-burning stove smoked quietly, the remains of a meal could be seen. Hanging from the walls were truncheons and various other implements that might be pressed into service to supress a man or many men. And a telephone, incongruous amid the paraphernalia of an earlier and more brutal century.