At the start everything was shocking to me. The prisoners were men and women whose lives had made them vicious enough to steal the bread from each other’s mouths, and who seethed and schemed with plans for escape or revolt, and proved endlessly ingenious in the slyness they used to rob the storehouse or their neighbours. Certain of the marines were not much better, and seemed to take pleasure in the floggings meted out, as if they were punishing the prisoners not for their crimes alone, but also for causing the marines to be in this place. There were times when the screams could be heard in every corner of the settlement.
Hunger and desperation, anger and fear, loss and yearning for home, brought out all that was worst in everyone. It was a place of sniping and slanders and barbed rumours, everyone watching each other for weakness and concealing their own. The narrow steep-sided valley where we all lived was like a crack in a wall where the roaches scrabbled over each other.
At first I dreamed confused shadowy tumults of fists and whirlwind. It shocked me when I realised that the horrors committed by the convicts, and inflicted on them, were no longer giving me nightmares.