But he stood quite unresisting, yielding his arms limply to the ropes, as though he hardly noticed what was happening.Įight o'clock struck and a bugle call, desolately thin in the wet air, floated from the distant barracks. It was like men handling a fish which is still alive and may jump back into the water. They crowded very close about him, with their hands always on him in a careful, caressing grip, as though all the while feeling him to make sure he was there. Two of them stood by with rifles and fixed bayonets, while the others handcuffed him, passed a chain through his handcuffs and fixed it to their belts, and lashed his arms tight to his sides. Six tall Indian warders were guarding him and getting him ready for the gallows. He had a thick, sprouting moustache, absurdly too big for his body, rather like the moustache of a comic man on the films. He was a Hindu, a puny wisp of a man, with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes. One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. These were the condemned men, due to be hanged within the next week or two. In some of them brown silent men were squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets draped round them. Each cell measured about ten feet by ten and was quite bare within except for a plank bed and a pot of drinking water.

We were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal cages. A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail yard. It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains.

Orwell burma