“As a political offender I was doomed to imprisonment at Ceuta, an old Moorish seaport town in Morocco, opposite Gibraltar and upon the side of the ancient mountain Abyla.  This mountain forms one of the ‘Pillars of Hercules,’ the Rock of Gibraltar being the other.  It is almost impregnable, and is used by Spain as Siberia is used by Russia, only it is far, far more horrible.  The town was built by the Moors in 945, and nowhere else on earth are there to be found an equal number of devices for the torture of human beings.  If anyone thinks the horrors of the Inquisition are no longer perpetrated let him get sent to Ceuta:  I have good cause to believe that the Inquisition itself is far from dead in Spain.  Alas for the person who is sent to Ceuta!  The town is small, and, to guard against possible attack, the Moors constructed a chain of fortresses around it.  It is in the black cellars of these disintegrating fortresses that the dungeons are located.  They are in tiers to the depth of fifty or sixty feet, and are hewn out of the solid rock.  They are reached through narrow openings in the stone floors of the fortresses, and when one of these horrible holes is opened the foul odor of filth and decomposition is utterly overpowering.  Some of these dungeons contain as many as thirty or forty men.  I was placed in a cell reserved for solitary confinement.  I have never been a man who regarded life seriously, or feared to risk it upon sufficient occasion, but my heart froze within me when the horror of my situation was revealed to me.  A stone box perhaps eight feet square —­as I lay upon the floor I could touch its opposite sides with my hands and feet—­had been prepared for my entrance by cutting a slit in one of its walls just large enough for the passage of my body.  Through this narrow opening I was dropped into the total darkness within.  A blacksmith followed and welded my fetters, for locks and keys are never used.  A chain having a heavy weight pendant from it was riveted to my ankle, and an iron band was similarly fastened to my waist.  This band was fastened by a chain to an iron ring deeply sunk in the solid rock.  When these horrible preparations were completed the blacksmith left me and a mason bricked up the slit through which I had entered, leaving only a hand-breadth of space for air and the thrusting through of such scraps of food as were to be allowed me.  Language is powerless to describe the feelings of a man in such a position.  He realises that his only hope is in disease —­disease bred of the darkness, the dampness, the starvation, and the horrible filth.  He says to himself:  ’How long, O God! how long?’—­For hours I remained prone and inert—­how long I do not know; night and day are all one in the dungeons of Ceuta.  Then I began to think.  Could I escape?  I felt that all power of thought, all cleverness would soon desert me, and I said to myself:  ’If anything is to be done, it must be done at once.’  I knew not then