“I myself am here for the first time,” said Nekhludoff, “and don’t know; but I think you had better ask this man,” and he pointed to the warder with the gold cords and the book, sitting on the right.

As they were speaking, the large iron door with a window in it opened, and an officer in uniform, followed by another warder, stepped out.  The warder with the notebook proclaimed that the admittance of visitors would now commence.  The sentinel stepped aside, and all the visitors rushed to the door as if afraid of being too late; some even ran.  At the door there stood a warder who counted the visitors as they came in, saying aloud, 16, 17, and so on.  Another warder stood inside the building and also counted the visitors as they entered a second door, touching each one with his hand, so that when they went away again not one visitor should be able to remain inside the prison and not one prisoner might get out.  The warder, without looking at whom he was touching, slapped Nekhludoff on the back, and Nekhludoff felt hurt by the touch of the warder’s hand; but, remembering what he had come about, he felt ashamed of feeling dissatisfied and taking offence.

The first apartment behind the entrance doors was a large vaulted room with iron bars to the small windows.  In this room, which was called the meeting-room, Nekhludoff was startled by the sight of a large picture of the Crucifixion.

“What’s that for?” he thought, his mind involuntarily connecting the subject of the picture with liberation and not with imprisonment.

He went on, slowly letting the hurrying visitors pass before, and experiencing a mingled feeling of horror at the evil-doers locked up in this building, compassion for those who, like Katusha and the boy they tried the day before, must be here though guiltless, and shyness and tender emotion at the thought of the interview before him.  The warder at the other end of the meeting-room said something as they passed, but Nekhludoff, absorbed by his own thoughts, paid no attention to him, and continued to follow the majority of the visitors, and so got into the men’s part of the prison instead of the women’s.

Letting the hurrying visitors pass before him, he was the last to get into the interviewing-room.  As soon as Nekhludoff opened the door of this room, he was struck by the deafening roar of a hundred voices shouting at once, the reason of which he did not at once understand.  But when he came nearer to the people, he saw that they were all pressing against a net that divided the room in two, like flies settling on sugar, and he understood what it meant.  The two halves of the room, the windows of which were opposite the door he had come in by, were separated, not by one, but by two nets reaching from the floor to the ceiling.  The wire nets were stretched 7 feet apart, and soldiers were walking up and down the space between them.  On the further side of the nets were the prisoners, on the nearer, the visitors.  Between them was a double row of nets and a space of 7 feet wide, so that they could not hand anything to one another, and any one whose sight was not very good could not even distinguish the face on the other side.  It was also difficult to talk; one had to scream in order to be heard.