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Show The Great Escape • 10 prison. By early September, all the escapees were on one side of the hallway, while the other side was filled with men who would be released soon. They had bargained with the common prisoners in the ground-floor corner to use their cell as the beginning of the tunnel. There remained the question of what to do with all the dirt they would be bringing up. Said Arturo: All of a sudden we got very pulchntudmous, wanting our privacy on the john and room freshener. We got permission to put curtains around our toilets and bed skirts on our beds. We kept our cells smelling fresh to cover the sweat and dirt. We were doing this pantomime of wanting our cells to look pretty. We asked for posters and paint. Our families brought us linens, which we sewed into bags to hold all the dirt we were excavating. We stacked it under our beds and inside our curtained toilets. By the time we were done, we had one toilet for every two cells. Every second toilet was completely covered in bags of dirt. The tunnel was dug over the course of sixteen days, beginning in mid-August. Men were digging constantly, day and night, using tools made from soap dishes and bed frames. The lead digger would scrape away, passing along the dirt and rocks he loosened. This would be collected by another man in the tunnel and pulled back to the surface m a small cart. Then the dirt was stuffed in bags and stepped on to compress it. For air, they used a giant bellows at the tunnel mouth that pumped through meters of taped-together cardboard tubes and rolled up magazmes, but the flow was minimal, and diggers often grew light-headed, until the tunnel crossed a sewer line, which was perforated to allow m a steady stream of (less-than-fresh) air. (The sewers were patrolled by the police, and a previous attempt to escape through the sewers had been foiled.) The tunnel was only big enough to crawl through, with a few wider sections so diggers could turn around and get back out. Arturo, skinny and flexible, could turn himself around without a turnaround by performing a sort of somersault. Diggers were given the best food and were assured undisturbed sleep, and lies about their health were fabricated to explain their absence from the soccer field and other activities. There were sometimes close calls, like the time when Arturo's father, who was also his lawyer, came to visit. The news came while Arturo was at the front of the tunnel, already past the |