two hands touching his shoulders behind. The line crept through the upper yard, along a track beaten as if into stone by its eternal passings, to the gates beneath the turret with its long, wicked muzzle of rapid-fire gun. The gates opened, and it filed out into a lane, between fences twenty feet high, made of barbed wire, to the jute-mill.
They worked without speech in the jute-mill, but 9009 saw some of the convicts, passing . among the looms on errands, steal words, sliding them through lips that remained motionless in their down-turned faces. He stood before a whirring loom. At the height of his eyes, behind the multitudinous perpendicular lines of the warp, a clacking shuttle fled swiftly from right to left, from left to right, in unceasing flight. Whenever a thread of warp or whoof broke he had to retie it quickly; whenever the shuttle became bare, he dipped his hand into a basket kept filled by another convict and drew a new one, threading it into place. This is all he had to do—tie strings and change shuttles.
