The scene was weird and uncanny.  I had recently read the “Iliad,” and the long lines of huge fires reminded me of that scene in the first book, where the Greeks burn on the sea shore the bodies of those smitten by Apollo’s pestilential-arrows

          For nine long nights, through all the dusky air,
          The pyres, thick flaming shot a dismal glare.

Five hundred weary men moved along slowly through double lines of guards.  Five hundred men marched silently towards the gates that were to shut out life and hope from most of them forever.  A quarter of a mile from the railroad we came to a massive palisade of great squared logs standing upright in the ground.  The fires blazed up and showed us a section of these, and two massive wooden gates, with heavy iron hinges and bolts.  They swung open as we stood there and we passed through into the space beyond.

We were in Andersonville.

CHAPTER XV.

Georgia—­A Lean and hungry land—­difference between upper and lower Georgia—­the pillage of Andersonville.

As the next nine months of the existence of those of us who survived were spent in intimate connection with the soil of Georgia, and, as it exercised a potential influence upon our comfort and well-being, or rather lack of these—­a mention of some of its peculiar characteristics may help the reader to a fuller comprehension of the conditions surrounding us—­our environment, as Darwin would say.

Georgia, which, next to Texas, is the largest State in the South, and has nearly twenty-five per cent. more area than the great State of New York, is divided into two distinct and widely differing sections, by a geological line extending directly across the State from Augusta, on the Savannah River, through Macon, on the Ocmulgee, to Columbus, on the Chattahoochie.  That part lying to the north and west of this line is usually spoken of as “Upper Georgia;” while that lying to the south and east, extending to the Atlantic Ocean and the Florida line, is called “Lower Georgia.”  In this part of the State—­though far removed from each other—­were the prisons of Andersonville, Savannah, Millen and Blackshear, in which we were incarcerated one after the other.

Upper Georgia—­the capital of which is Atlanta—­is a fruitful, productive, metalliferous region, that will in time become quite wealthy.  Lower Georgia, which has an extent about equal to that of Indiana, is not only poorer now than a worn-out province of Asia Minor, but in all probability will ever remain so.

It is a starved, sterile land, impressing one as a desert in the first stages of reclamation into productive soil, or a productive soil in the last steps of deterioration into a desert.  It is a vast expanse of arid, yellow sand, broken at intervals by foul swamps, with a jungle-life growth of unwholesome vegetation, and teeming With venomous snakes, and all manner of hideous crawling thing.