The Cumber Poidy Prison. (extract taken from Understanding the past, a school textbook by Prof. Mufudazi Flowers) "Chapter 11. The following years were a time of excitement and violence. Never had there been so many geniuses: never had there been so much murder, thuggery and thievery. Across the former territories of the aristocrats, old ways of dealing with criminals had been wiped out. The families, with their lists of individual laws and punishments, had disappeared, leaving a vacuum. The Goolooians had always used ostracism as a punishment, and the people who lived in the former estates followed suit, but this was not as effective as it had once been. Now that the country had opened up, it was a relatively simple matter for a criminal to travel to the next town and establish themselves anew. A plague of personal vendettas spread across the centre of the country, with murder following murder. The Exians were called upon to find a solution. "This sort of thing happens in Word," wrote one estate's ex-citizen to the Exian Minister of Earth, "but we are not in Word. The people terrorising us are brutes." The Isle of Yunck, a small island off the south-west coast, seemed to be the answer. Yunck, along with its smaller neighbour, Aorist Island, had been used as a resting place for fisherpeople since early times. They warned one another to stay away from the hole at the bottom of the Yunck Waterfall, which led straight down into what was assumed to be a large cavern. In The Year of Established Stone (1530) a group of Exians set out to explore this cavern and discovered an extensive system of subterranean tunnels, winding through the rock in all directions, and widening, here and there, into large caves. One of the explorers likened it to a tangle of vines upon which pods (the caves) grew. The island was isolated and barren, and any attempt at swimming to the mainland would be thwarted by the rough waters of Pithistle Strait. It was a wonderful place for a prison. The Exians set about modifying the caves. Locked barriers were erected to serve as cell doors, chains were fastened to the walls, and ventilation shafts were drilled to connect the tunnels to the outside air. A set of interconnected caves behind the waterfall were turned into rooms for the prison governor and the prison staff. To reach these rooms, a person had to walk around the Poidy lake, which almost filled the cavern into which the waterfall fell, and up a flight of stone stairs to a flat platform concealed behind the curtain of roaring water. Doors were cut into the ceilings of the wardens' rooms and the stairs were guarded. In the event of a break-out, any staff member who could get to their quarters had a good chance of escaping to the surface and sealing the rampaging prisoners underground. The only entrance to the caves, besides the doors in the personal chambers, was a sloping tunnel which opened onto the flat platform behind the falls. The original explorers had lowered themselves down through the hole used by the waterfall, but that was a vertical drop, impossible to ascend through without equipment. Even with a rope and a crew of helpers it was incredibly dangerous, and the Exians saw five of their explorers swallowed by the falls before the alternative entrance was built. In the Year of the Prison (1600) the first prisoners were taken to the island. They came from all parts of the country, but principally the northern areas of the Flatlands which was the area most easily accessible to Exians. Only two came from Ex, which did not suffer badly from the crime problem. Years later, one of the prison guards wrote, "The idea was that we would somehow stay strong while the prisoners buckled under the strain. Hah. All of us were trapped underground. Everybody suffered. Not just the prisoners: everybody. Did they care, back there on the mainland? Did they, like fun they did! They'd got their bad people out of their hair and they were fine, thanks! We were the ones who had to deal with it." The prison overseers did not cope well with the isolation or their new underground life. They became brutal. News of this did not reach the mainland for a long time. The prisoners were the only ones who might have complained about it, and no-one from the mainland was interested in speaking to prisoners. The first warning came from Clarke Turtlebell, the prison's third doctor and author of An Unnatural Death. "Dobermann's back was like a bloody sponge, while, in the interval between the lashes, the swollen flesh twitched like that of a newly-killed beastie. Suddenly, the experienced flogger saw his head drop below his shoulders. "Pull him off!" he shouted. "Throw some water over him." They did, and Dobermann's eyes opened. "I knew it," said Rosebush. "He was faking." " Mainlanders were shocked by Turtlebell's story, but the crime rate had barely decreased and there was not a lot of sympathy abroad for imprisoned criminals. When the prison governor was asked for an explaination, he sent back a soothing article which, among other things, accused Turtlebell of fictional exaggeration. It was many years before the weight of testimony from ex-guards brought about the prison's closure. We will learn more about that in our next chapter. Go back to the Timeline or ahead to The Development of Cumber Poidy.