WHISPERING DUNGEON

Southland Times, Issue 21098, 2 June 1930, Page 9

WHISPERING DUNGEON

“LOUD SPEAKER” ROCK.

HASTINGS CASTLE MARVEL.

In Hastings Castle is the most gruesome dungeon in England, which seems to have escaped the attention of the guide-books. Commander H. M. Daniel late of the Royal Navy writes:— i Apart from its horrible instruments of torture and its lethal chambers, I was fascinated by the whispering dungeon. I doubt whether engineers of to-day With their elaborate apparatus, could construct a chamber in the solid rock with such peculiar qualities.

The prisoners, escorted to the cliff-top fortress, would be ushered through a doorway in the rock into a' narrow passage. A sudden thrust behind the knees and they would slide down to a chamber some 15ft. beneath. Groping in the darkness, they

would find themselves in a large vault with walls cut in the solid rock by the flint tomahawk of neolithic times.

After the guides had gone, what more natural than the prisoners should talk in whispers, not only of their fate but of the activities of their comrades? There in the darkness, with many feet of solid rock between them and the outside world, such whisperings they thotight, surely must be safe.

Some 60ft. away, in a sort of sentry-box cut in the rock, stood the inquisitor. The prisoners’ whispers were intensified just as the wireless valve magnifies the feeble sound of a distant signal. Each whispered confidence was overheard; in fact, had the prisoners only known it, louder utterances, which would become confused in sonorous echoes would have been safer.

The custodian, Mr Stephen A. Isles, said that he could hear at the listening post the ticking of a stop-watch in the distant dungeon. The only, other place in the world with similar qualities, so far as he is aware is a dungeon at Dijon, France, where, how-

ever, the effects are not so phenomenal. At each place, he said, there is a strata of iron ore running through the rock.

The formation of the dungeon and its passages were compared by Mr Isles with that of a wireless circuit and the loud speaker. If a piece of paper, he said, were placed in front of a certain recess in the rock-face, the acoustic properties would collapse, but would be restored if the paper were pierced by an appreciable hole’. •>..

Mr Isles stated how he rediscovered the dungeon’s whispering qualities. He said: “As,-; I was passing the listening-post, I sudden- , ly heard myself being reviled by a voice which seemed to come from the solid rock. I searched and found a small.hole leading, to what might be called the echo-chamber of the dungeon. A workman whom I had told to do some work that he did not like was there muttering disapproval under his breath. On being challenged with his own words the workman was inclined to accuse me of reading his thoughts.”