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.
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