Memoirs of a Revolutionist by Peter Kropotkin

The worst was the silence, as of the grave, which reigned about me. In vain I knocked on the walls and struck the floor with my foot, listening for the faintest sound in reply. None was to be heard. One month passed, then two, three, fifteen months, but there was no reply to my knocks. We were only six then, scattered among thirty-six casemates -- all my arrested comrades being kept in the Litóvskiy Zámok prison. When the noncommissioned officer entered my cell to take me out for a walk, and I asked him, "What kind of weather have we? Does it rain? " he cast a furtive side glance at me, and without saying a word promptly retired behind the door, where a sentry and another noncommissioned officer kept watch upon him. The only living being from whom I could hear even a few words was the governor, who came to my cell every morning to say "good morning" and ask whether I wanted to buy tobacco or paper. I tried to engage him in conversation; but he also cast furtive glances at the noncommissioned officers who stood in the half-opened door, as if to say, "You see, I am watched, too. " Only the pigeons were not afraid to hold intercourse with me. Every morning and afternoon they came to my window to receive their food through the grating.

There were no sounds whatever except the squeak of the sentry's boots, the hardly perceptible noise of the shutter of the Judas, and the ringing of the bells on the fortress cathedral. They rang a "Lord save me" (Góspodi pomílui) every quarter of an hour -- one, two, three, four times. Then, each hour, the big bell struck slowly, with long intervals between successive strokes. A lugubrious canticle followed, chimed by the bells, which at every sudden change of temperature went out of tune, making at such times a horrible cacophony which sounded like the ringing of bells at a burial. At the gloomy hour of midnight, the canticle, moreover, was followed by the discordant notes of a "God save the Tsar. " The ringing lasted a full quarter of an hour; and no sooner had it come to an end than a new "Lord save me" announced to the sleepless prisoner that a quarter of an hour of his uselessly spent life had gone in the meantime, and that many quarters of an hour, and hours, and days, and months of the same vegetative life would pass, before his keepers, or maybe death, would release him.