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A Sociology of Crime 2nd Edition Stephen Hester Digital
Instant Download
Author(s): Stephen Hester; Peter Eglin
ISBN(s): 9781315660318, 1315660318
Edition: 2nd
File Details: PDF, 41.95 MB
Year: 2017
Language: english
A Sociology of Crime

Hester and Eglin’s A Sociology of Crime has an outstanding reputation

for its distinctive and systematic contribution to the criminologi-
cal literature. Through detailed examples and analysis, it shows how
crime is a product of processes of criminalization constituted through
interactional and organizational uses of language.
In this welcome second edition, the book evaluates the current
state of criminalization globally and asks what sociology’s various
perspectives have to say about it. It maintains and develops its critical
and subversive stance but greatly widens its theoretical range, includ-
ing dedicated chapters on gender, race and class. It now also provides
questions, exercises and suggestions for further reading alongside its
detailed analysis of a new set of contemporary international examples.

Stephen Hester was Professor of Sociology at Bangor University,

UK. He retired in 2009, but continued to be active in ethnomethodo-
logical and conversation-analytic research. He authored, co-authored
or co-edited eight books and more than 40 articles and book chapters,
notably An Invitation to Ethnomethodology (2004) and Orders of Ordinary
Action (2007), both with David Francis, and Descriptions of Deviance,
a book on membership categorization analysis left unfinished at his
untimely death in April 2014.

Peter Eglin is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Wilfrid Laurier

University in Canada. He has been Humboldt Research Fellow at
the University of Konstanz and Visiting Research Associate at the
Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Wolfson College, Oxford. As a visit-
ing professor he has taught at the University of Toronto, Northumbria
University and Bangor University. His work has been translated into
French, Italian, Spanish and Japanese. He has contributed chapters to
the Handbook of Sociology and Human Rights (2013) and the Routledge
Handbook of Language and Culture (2014). He wrote extensively with
Stephen Hester, including the monograph The Montreal Massacre (2003).
A Sociology of
Crime
Second edition

Stephen Hester and

Peter Eglin
First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 Stephen Hester and Peter Eglin
The right of Stephen Hester and Peter Eglin to be identified as authors
of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Eglin, Peter, author. | Hester, Stephen, author. | Hester, Stephen.
A sociology of crime.
Title: A sociology of crime / by Peter Eglin and Stephen Hester.
Description: Second edition. | New York : Routledge, 2017. |
Revised edition of the authors’ A sociology of crime, 1992.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016050712| ISBN 9781138960473 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781138960480 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781315660318 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Crime—Sociological aspects. | Sociology—Methodology.
Classification: LCC HV6025 .E35 2017 | DDC 364—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016050712

ISBN: 978-1-138-96047-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-96048-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-66031-8 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Keystroke, Neville Lodge, Tettenhall, Wolverhampton
For Sociology
 Contents

List of figures and boxes ix

Preface xi

1 Sociology 1

PART I
Positively undertaken 39

Introduction 41

2 State 46

3 Society 84

PART II
Interpretatively turned 113

Introduction 115

4 Claims-making 124

5 Defining the situation 151

6 Practical reasoning 198

vii
 CONTENTS

PART III
Politically challenged 239

Introduction 241

7 Class 247

8 Gender 316

9 Race 353

PART IV
Epistemically undermined 389

Introduction 391

10 Power 397

11 People? 433

12 Conclusion 473

References 480
Index 554

viii
 Figures and
boxes

Figures
1.1 Members of the public admitting to lawbreaking 5
1.2 Creating crime and criminals 34
5.1 Four types of deviant behaviour 190
8.1 Data appendix 342–3

Boxes
1 Philosophical tributaries of the interpretative turn 120
2 One criminologist’s theoretical journey 155
3 Two-set classes or two-class sets 245
4 Marx and Engels on “globalization” 248
5 Reiman on Marx’s analysis of criminalization in capitalist society 249
6 Capitalism as a totalizing process 256
7 A note on structural Marxism 259
8 Matoesian on “detailing-to-death” in a rape trial 346
9 Chambliss on race and the War on Drugs 365
10 “The accumulated evil of the whole”: Afghanistan 2001–2016 436
11 Politics or crime? 445
12 When Canada used hunger to clear the West 456
13 Canadian government withheld food from hungry aboriginal
kids in 1940s nutritional experiments, researcher finds 458

ix
 Preface

This book embodies a preposterous idea. It is an academic textbook,

with an attitude about a field of study, looking for readers. The field
is crime, the academic discipline is sociology and the attitude is that
of ethnomethodology. The book is written for students of sociol-
ogy, inside and outside the academy, who have an interest in crime.
Who doesn’t have an interest in crime? – that’s the question. Crime
is everywhere. It’s on all the time. But who reads an academic text-
book designed for a course of study about it? Who now reads such a
thing? Do you, dear reader? Actually read it? Former Prime Minister
of Canada, Stephen Harper, (in)famously declared that crime – he
was referring to the 1,100 cases of missing and murdered aboriginal
women – is not a sociological phenomenon, and that this is not
the time to be “committing sociology.” Well, really, what does he
know?!
This book started out more than a generation ago as an accom-
paniment to a set of 12 television programs for a distance education
version of a second-year classroom course on criminology at Wilfrid
Laurier University. Hester and I had been teaching criminology for
years by that point, he mostly in the UK, while I taught in Canada.
Distance Education was taking off, particularly in sociology, and we
took the bait. The first edition was published in 1992. It sold well
enough that at three points in the 2000s, a new edition was mooted,
but for various reasons, including a bout of ill health on my part, never
came to fruition. An Italian edition had appeared out of nowhere in
1999. In October 2014, the call came again, but by then Steve had,
tragically, died at the age of 66 the previous April. You can find his
obituary online where his impressive contributions to sociology are

xi
 PREFACE

duly noted. I agreed to take on the new edition, a proposal was

submitted, reviewed and accepted, and here we are.
When a second edition was first being proposed, Steve wrote to
me in February 2004 as follows: “In short, if we were to do anything
with the book at all then I’d be in favour of doing an entirely EM/
CA [ethnomethodology/conversation analysis] rewrite, in which we
not only present exemplificatory studies but engage theoretically and
methodologically with the mainstream.” On the third go, in January
2010, he wrote: “So, what I am suggesting is not just a more histori-
cally oriented book but a rather more argumentative one with, in
addition to exposition of previous approaches, more emphasis on
where we stand.” Steve was particularly enamoured with Harvey
Sacks’s work on membership categorization analysis (MCA). The
lectures and studies by Sacks on and in MCA were his passion, and
though he never completed it, his book on Descriptions of Deviance,
devoted to MCA, can now be accessed on the legacy website of
the International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation
Analysis (IIEMCA). For the crime book, he particularly wanted to
get past the constructionist position we had adopted as the overall
viewpoint of the first edition. Accordingly, I have tried to take him at
his word, and radicalize in an ethnomethodological sense what was
already the “subversive” tradition of anti-correctionalist sociologies
with which we had aligned ourselves in the original edition. This is
what I mean by the “attitude” the new edition has.You can catch it
in its pure version in the papers presented at the workshop on radical
ethnomethodology held at Manchester Metropolitan University in the
UK on 22–23 June 2016, a couple of which are cited herein.
Each of the substantive chapters (2–11) of the book deals with
a particular theoretical perspective on crime and criminalization,
and each of them (except for Chapter 6) has more or less the same
three-part structure consisting of theoretical exposition, exemplary
studies and grammatical respecification. The theory and examples
are the textbook, while “grammatical respecification,” in that over-
heated phrase, contains and conveys the “attitude.” If you don’t like
the “attitude,” you can just read the “textbook.” That would be a
shame, though, because if the book has any news to report it is to be
found in the grammar sections.
While a substantial part of the content of the first edition has
been retained, some has been replaced and more has been added.

xii
PREFACE

To the extent possible, there has been an attempt to combine an

historical and methodo-epistemo-logical ordering of the chapters.
To assist in this ordering, the text has been divided into four parts,
and introductions written for each part. Gender and race, which had
been submerged within the “structural-conflict perspective” in the
first edition, have been given their own chapters (8 and 9) as part of
“emancipatory theory.” Poststructuralism and postmodernism, which
were absent from the first edition, have a whole part (IV) to them-
selves in this one. Postcolonialism is also duly recognized (Chapter
11). The whole of the text has been re-written.
With Stephen gone, the question arises – who is the author of this
book? Well, it’s both of us.You will find the pronoun “we” through-
out the text. Just what it is doing, including who it is referring to, is
itself an interesting question, but not one there is the space to pursue
here. Suffice it to say that it has two principal uses: one to refer to
“we” the members of society (I know, according to emancipators and
post-als, this is an “ideological” we, but then, what do they know?!);
and one to refer to Steve and me. But sometimes it refers to “Steve”
and me, sometimes to the royal me, and sometimes to me and you,
dear reader, as co-producers of the intelligibility of this text. On
occasion I have used “the author” or “Eglin” for a particular purpose.
In the last chapter, I speak in my own voice and so, like here, use
“I.” Throughout I trust you to find, through the standard members’
methods of sociological inquiry, which use is which.
I wish to thank Tim Berard, Dave Francis, Gavin Fridell and Max
Travers for reading and helpfully commenting on parts of the text,
as well as the following colleagues who have assisted me in various
ways: Jeffrey Aguinaldo, Kieran Bonner, Jeff Coulter, Hazel Croall,
Paul Drew, Thomas Gabor, Christian Greiffenhagen (for last-minute
provision of an important paper), Mike Lynch, Michael Manley,
Mihnea Panu, Herbert Pimlott, Dorothy Smith, Rod Watson and,
especially, Patrick Watson, whose collegiality and ready willingness to
help out where he could were invaluable. I particularly want to thank
Yvan Clermont (Director, Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics) for
providing some of the material in Chapter 2, and journalists Tim
Bousquet, Pete McMartin and Gordon Sinclair Jr for their help with
particular inquiries. At Wilfrid Laurier University, librarians Dawn
Matthew, Amy Menary, Cindy Preece and Deb Wills were ever at the
ready to help me get access to works that were not readily available.

xiii
 PREFACE

Special thanks go to Wallace Shawn for once again trying to expedite

my obtaining permission to reprint some words from his extraordinary
play, The Fever.
Most of the book was written in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where my
wife had one of those nine-month, limited-term, contract positions
that the neoliberal university system is using to crush the power
of the faculty and thereby further reduce the university that Bill
Readings 20 years ago (1996) described as already “in ruins.” That
aside, I am grateful to Augie Westhaver, Chair of Sociology at Saint
Mary’s University, for facilitating my getting “Visiting Researcher”
status so that I had electronic and physical access to library materials
on the same basis as faculty there. In Halifax we were buoyed up by a
wonderful set of colleagues who became firm friends – Kate Ervine
and Gavin Fridell, Judy and Larry Haiven, Rylan (and Hao) Higgins,
and Nuri (and Hatice) Gultekin who were visiting from Turkey,
plus all their great kids. A special nod goes to the crew of baristas
at Humani-T Café on South Park Street. In Kitchener-Waterloo,
where we live when we are not off somewhere else, I would like to
thank Gloria Chapman, my dear mother-in-law, for letting me take
over part of her basement so as to keep writing for six weeks in the
summer of 2016. Here’s a shout-out too to Mel and Nina and co. at
Balzac’s coffee shop at the Tannery in Kitchener.
The final chapters of the book were written under pressure to
finish in the Fall of 2016 in an apartment in Zacatecas, Zacatecas,
Mexico where Debbie had been awarded a scholarship to pursue
research at the Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas Francisco García
Salinas. I particularly wish to acknowledge the very kind and cour-
teous reception accorded me as the just-retired “spouse” by Raúl
Delgado Wise (Head, Department of Development Studies) and
colleagues Mark Rushton and Darcy Tetreault.
For passing on her knowledge of the court system in Toronto, I
thank Sukhpreet Sangha. For their interest and support, I thank the
many members of the Chapman (Ruiz-Chapman) family. I especially
thank Ralph Gastmeier for his constant friendship and camaraderie.
For permissions to reprint, I thank Mohamed Elmasry for part
of my “State-organized crimes in Afghanistan” from The Canadian
Charger, 5 November 2013 (Eglin 2013a); James Daschuk (2013a) for
“When Canada used hunger to clear the West,” The Globe and Mail, 19
July 2013; The Canadian Press for “Canadian government withheld

xiv
PREFACE

food from hungry aboriginal kids in 1940s nutritional experiments,

researcher finds,” by Bob Weber, The Globe and Mail, 16/17 July 2013;
Pearson Education for Figure 3.1 “Creating Crime and Criminals,”
from p. 41 of Crime and Society in Britain, second edition, by Hazel
Croall, © Pearson Education Limited 2011; University of Toronto
Press for Table 1 from p. 55 of Everybody Does It! by Thomas Gabor, ©
University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1994; Grove/Atlantic (US
rights) and Faber & Faber (UK and electronic rights) for an excerpt
from The Fever, © 1991 by Wallace Shawn. Used by permission of
Grove/Atlantic, Inc. and Faber & Faber. Any third party use of this
material, outside this publication, is prohibited.
My thanks for their editorial assistance also go to Gerhard
Boomgarden, Alyson Claffey (especially for the cover), Catherine
Gray and Peter Lloyd at Routledge, and to Helen Lund (for scrupu-
lous copyediting), Kelly Winter, Maggie Lindsey-Jones, Sue Harper
and the rest of the production team at Keystroke.
Debbie Chapman is the most determined and courageous person
I know.You will have to take my word for it. I will say this, though.
She has no time for police (especially on horseback), the military
or any other state control agent. She despises the ubiquitous use of
such clichéd phrases as “it’s all about choices” and “we need to have
conversations,” particularly in political contexts. She fumes over gov-
ernments’ recourse to private consultants and the micro-managing
of so-called public “consultations.” She’s a committed socialist, and
a fierce critic of individualized or corporate or NGO-ized solutions
to social problems. See, for example, her critique of international
service learning in Third World Quarterly (2016). She’s a loyal ally and
defender of the exploited people of the global South. She is, quite
simply, my inspiration. Thanks to her, I was able to get through the
writing of this new edition. Thanks to her, life is good.
Finally, this new edition would never have been begun at all were it
not for the agreement, encouragement and support of Steve’s widow,
Sally Hester, and Steve’s long-time collaborator and fast friend, Dave
Francis. I have tried my best, guys, to make it worthy of him.
Peter Eglin
17 December 2016
Zacatecas, Zacatecas, Mexico

xv
 1 Sociology

MEAT IS MURDER

Introduction
It doesn’t matter where we start, so let’s jump right in. Crime is
readily at hand. Check the news feed on your cell phone. What
crime stories are being reported there? On New Year’s Eve 2015, the
Flipboard daily edition had the following headlines, among others:
“Security Raised at New Year Celebrations Amid World Terror
Fears”;“Ramadi residents fleeing ISIS:‘They want to use us as human
shields’”;“TCU QB Boykin charged with felony assault, suspended”;
“Bill Cosby Accuser Beth Ferrier on His Arrest for Decade-Old
Alleged [Sexual Assault].” In August 2016, Canadian supermarket
checkout stands announced “Canada’s New Crime Wave” on the
front page of Maclean’s (“Canada’s National Magazine”). In the last
days of the 2015 Canadian federal election campaign, as this writ-
ing was under way, the national news spoke of radio and print ads
put out by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives targeting
Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, saying that the latter would, if successful in
winning the election, make marijuana available for sale to children
and would bring prostitution in the form of brothels to residential
neighbourhoods.1 The ads were being released in areas of the country
with large South Asian populations.
The early part of the election campaign was dominated by the trial
of Mike Duffy, a Harper-appointed senator, former journalist and
Canadian national media celebrity who, in July 2014, was charged
with 31 offences including bribery, and fraud and breach of trust in

1
 1: SOCIOLOGY

relation to C$90,000 in expenses that he claimed inappropriately as

a senator.2 Throughout the campaign, calls persisted for a national
inquiry into “missing and murdered aboriginal/indigenous women.”3
The end of the campaign was distinguished by the display of tough-
on-crime Harper holding a rally fronted by the Ford brothers.
Rob Ford was the mayor (and thereby chief magistrate) of Toronto,
known world-wide for his admitted addiction to crack cocaine; he
had been investigated by police.4 One could multiply such examples
with equivalent cases from the United States, the United Kingdom,
Australia and New Zealand, indeed from virtually every country in
the world.
Local news in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where the writing of this book
was being done, was reporting the testimony of a police officer at the
murder trial of Dennis Oland, charged with killing his father, Richard
Oland.The family were founders of Moosehead Beer.The officer was
saying that he was urged to lie on the stand by a more senior officer.5
Those subscribing to truthout.org would have found in their email
inbox the following blurb heralding one of the articles in this daily
news digest: “According to a new lawsuit, two psychologists earned
more than $80 million for developing a set of brutal interrogation
methods and supervising their use on detainees in secret overseas CIA
prisons, which led to the death of one man and the traumatization of
two others”; they were accused of being in a “‘criminal enterprise’
with [the] CIA over torture.”6
You can confirm the ready availability of crime by going to the
website of your local newspaper or radio or TV station and scrolling
through the headlines, or by browsing the channel guide on your
television. Crime stories and crime shows abound (although they
might more appropriately be called “police” shows). The business
pages of the major dailies are a particularly rich source, while the
big chain bookstores still display a shelf called “True Crime.” You
can ask yourself whether crime has or has not been the topic of at
least one conversation you’ve already had today, whether in person,
by phone or text or online. Perhaps it was about that assault at the
university residence, or the episode of some crime show or movie
you watched last night. Or perhaps the last book you read for pleas-
ure was a “police procedural,” a crime thriller or detective story.You
may be able to recount details of the last mass shooting reported in
the United States, recall the names of notorious serial killers or put a

2
1: SOCIOLOGY

face to the last African American shot dead by a white police officer
in the land of the free; US police killed 1,126 people in 2015, killing
blacks at twice the rate as whites.7 You know how to call the police,
and may well have seen the inside of your local courthouse.You are
familiar with the uniformed security officers you see everywhere,
who look like police and have quasi-police powers, not to mention
the security cameras at every turn. Where you live may be a “neigh-
bourhood watch” community, and you may have received a recorded
phone message informing you of some local crime concern.You lock
your doors at night.You will recognize police cars and police officers
(on foot, on bikes, on horses, on motorcycles) when you see them
on the streets and highways you frequent, or at televised funerals for
“fallen officers,” at memorial parades and ceremonial events or dur-
ing seasonal roadside “blitzes” for drinking and driving.You may have
been kettled (contained) by them at a protest or demonstration.You
may recall the visit of a police officer to your school or your child’s
school. You will probably have an opinion about the desirability of
capital punishment, the criminalization of abortion, the legalization
of marijuana (see also Potter and Kappeler 1998: vi). You may have
strong feelings about terrorism, violent crime, “pedophiles,” gangs,
the War on Drugs, cyberstalking, solitary confinement, drinking
and driving, sexual assault, criminals who “get off easy,” mandatory
minimum sentences, whether “Black Lives Matter,” home invasions,
Oscar Pistorius.8 These feelings may have been stoked by the election
platform of one or other of the political parties vying for your vote
recently. The notice board in the shop where you bought coffee this
morning may have sported a poster like this one advertising a play:
“Hard Boiled: A Sal Dali Crime Tale.” Or, on the surface of the paved
trail where you run each day, there may look back at you in stark,
hard-to-remove capital letters the slogan, “MEAT IS MURDER.”
Moreover, you yourself may have been the victim of crime. Your
house or car may have been broken into, your purse snatched, your
corner store held up, your local bank robbed, your credit card or other
form of identity stolen, your property vandalized, your person assaulted,
your village or town destroyed. If it hasn’t happened to you, you will
probably know of a relative, friend, neighbour or local resident who has
been victimized by such an act, or you will have seen it on the news.
Such an experience may, in fact, have prompted you to be inter-
ested in crime, interested enough to have picked up or uploaded

3
 1: SOCIOLOGY

this book, perhaps even bought a copy of it (thank you). In that

case, you are probably taking a university course with crime, law or
justice in its title. And the course may well be part of a program in
criminology or criminal justice or sociology or legal studies of the
sort that is popular in colleges and universities. Such a course may
afford you contact with one or another component of the criminal
justice system (CJS) – the laws, police, courts, probation offices and
correctional institutions in all their various forms.You may be taking
such a course while in prison.You may be familiar with institutions
ancillary to the CJS such as crime prevention councils, legal aid, vic-
tims’ and other legal services, youth or community justice initiatives,
shelters for battered women, rape crisis centres, organizations such
as Citizens Concerned With Crimes Against Children, ex-offenders’
support organizations such as the Elizabeth Fry and John Howard
societies, advocacy groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving
(MADD) or Victims of Crime. Moreover, you are almost certainly
an offender yourself.
“What? I’m not a criminal,” you say. Well, think about it for a
minute. There’s all the underage drinking you’ve done, whether or
not you were drunk and disorderly in public or drove (a car or boat)
under the influence of alcohol or drugs or without a licence. Unless
the criminal law has been recently changed where you are, then your
possession and use of marijuana and/or its derivatives in other than
very small quantities is almost certainly a criminal offence, not to
mention any dealing you may be involved with. But if you are not
smoking dope, you are most probably illegally downloading copy-
righted material from the internet, which is called piracy.Then there’s
the impersonation or fraud you committed with the fake ID, the
money or goods you stole from work, the tax evasion you practise
or are party to – you know, being paid by your family’s business for
work you never did so as to lower your parents’ taxes. One of the two
authors of this book was caught travelling on a French train with his
step-daughter’s expired Eurail pass. Some of you will have committed
more serious offences such as assault, including, if you are male, sexual
assault, or theft or causing property damage. If we add in what are
sometimes called quasi-criminal offences, notably breaches of your
jurisdiction’s version of the Province of Ontario’s Highway Traffic
Act, which includes speeding and other traffic offences, then virtually
nobody escapes the label of criminal (see Tisdale 1998).

4
1: SOCIOLOGY

Students in Eglin’s sociology of crime course, in informal surveys

conducted more or less annually through the 2000s, reported their
participation in crime at the following roughly average rates (for
selected offences): drinking and driving, 40 per cent; drinking/drunk
in public, 65 per cent; drinking under age, 85 per cent; indecent
behaviour, 50 per cent; disturbing the peace, 30 per cent; theft, 60 per
cent; damage (vandalism), 40 per cent; forgery, 55 per cent; piracy, 65
per cent; drug offences, 70 per cent; assault, 15 per cent. The point
was made most famously in the table reproduced in Figure 1.1 from
Wallerstein and Wyle’s 1947 US study as reprinted in Thomas Gabor’s
(1994) appropriately named book Everybody Does It! Crime by the
Public, in which he documents the point at length.

Figure 1.1 Members of the public admitting to lawbreaking

Source: Gabor (1994: 55). Original source: Wallerstein and Wyle (1947: 110).

Wallerstein and Wyle state:

Perhaps the principal conclusion to be drawn from this study is the

revelation of the prevalence of lawlessness among respectable peo-
ple . . . From this angle the punitive attitude of society toward the
convicted offender becomes not only hypocritical but pointless.
(Wallerstein and Wyle 1947: 118)

Except, of course, that not only do you not think of yourself as a

criminal, you’ve never actually been apprehended for such an offence

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(although more than a few of you certainly have), let alone been
charged, tried, convicted or sentenced for such an offence, so that
it may be said of you that you got away with it. The label was never
applied. “Getting away with” crime is very much part of the crime
landscape. Indeed, the fact that crime may be got away with means
that it is not a naturally self-revealing thing. It must be shown to be
such.While we are inclined to think that an action in itself is or is not
criminal, we are prepared to allow that it must be identified, observed,
apprehended or detected as such; such that if that labelling does not
occur in any particular instance, we do not become “criminal” in
any socially meaningful sense. So, although we may retain the sense
that our action was, indeed, a criminal one, and that we did indeed
get away with it, it does not follow that we think of ourselves as
criminals. So there are crimes and there are criminals. The two do
not necessarily equate.
We know, too, that for an action to be found to be a crime, in the
end it must be shown to have been committed with criminal intent
(although there are exceptions like drinking and driving). The gun
could have gone off accidentally, the child could have been too young
to appreciate the gravity of the act, the adult may not have been
criminally responsible by virtue of mental illness, mental handicap
or having been forced. The act could have been in self-defence. The
homicide may have been justifiable if carried out by, say, a uniformed
soldier in combat. Accusations can be false, identities mistaken, evi-
dence tainted, witnesses hostile, charges withdrawn, sentences can be
inadequate or excessive, convictions wrongful. Crime, in short, is a
contested category, and we know it.
Whether you are interested in crime or not, you know that many
people in society cannot help but be “interested” in it as it is their job
to engage with it on a daily basis. A considerable range of occupa-
tions deals with crime, from police to Supreme Court Justices, from
legal secretaries to crime scene investigators, from narcotics divi-
sions to war crimes units, from crime beat reporters to prison guards,
from academic criminologists to Ministry of the Attorney-General
researchers and so on. Some types of crime are engaged in by some
people on a more or less occupational basis like drug trafficking and
drug dealing, armed robbery, safe cracking, shoplifting, contract kill-
ing, burglary, living off the avails of prostitution, human trafficking,
assassination of official enemies, state terrorism, accounting fraud,

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bribery of officials and so on. See, for example, The New Confessions
of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins (2016) or “The bribe
factory” (2016).9
Crimes, then, have perpetrators or offenders, the ones who com-
mit the offence, and victims, the ones who suffer the loss attending
the offence. We allow, though, that some crimes may be thought of
as “victimless,” as the only one harmed, if anyone, appears to be the
offender him- or herself. And some may acquire the status of what
Joseph Gusfield, referring to drinking and driving, calls “moral fault
without censure”: “at the level of public attention there is the persis-
tent and shrill cry for more punishment; at the level of daily events
there is the negotiation between lawbreakers and law enforcers and
the continued existence of prohibited acts” (Gusfield 1981: 132).
Taking this a step further, Eglin will never forget regularly witness-
ing a posse of Mexican police standing waiting to go on (or come
off) shift, quite oblivious to cars driving past them using the off ramp
to drive on to the periferico (a major highway) at the Plateros exit
in Mexico City; or another group of such police quite openly and
nonchalantly guarding an illegal casino set up in the middle of the
Cuernavaca Fair in 2004 (Cuevas Villalobos 2004).
Nevertheless, crimes, we say, are wrongs. They are not morally
neutral. When such acts occur, they are not mere matters of interest
but, depending on their nature and gravity, they elicit moral condem-
nation, not only from their victims but from society generally. They
demand redress, we say, in the form of punishment of the offender or
restoration of the victim’s loss or both. And we have institutions spe-
cifically designed to provide those remedies.That “loss” can be in the
form of terrible physical or emotional damage suffered by the victim,
which may last for years in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD). The offence caused by the crime to the integrity of the
victim’s person can be extended to their home or other possessions,
to their family and friends. A “wave” of offences in a particular area
may occasion a crime scare in the form of fear among local residents
and demands for greater enforcement of the law in order to restore
(a sense of) public safety (Fishman 1978: 531). Criminal offences have
the capacity to stir moral outrage throughout a community, whether
locally, regionally, nationally or, indeed, internationally.We know this
to be true of the 2011 “Norway attacks” by Anders Breivik in which
he shot dead 69 participants of a Workers’ Youth League summer camp

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(see Moore 2015); the war crimes of Israel in Operation Protective

Edge in 2014 in which its forces killed 2,200 Palestinians, of whom
70–75 per cent were civilians including 500 children (Finkelstein 2014:
156); and, of course, 9/11 itself in which nearly 3,000 people were
killed, almost all US nationals (see Chomsky 2011).
In the same way, efforts to criminalize theretofore-legal activi-
ties can also occasion concern, outrage, condemnation and protest
among sections of the public. The anti-terrorism acts passed in
Western countries in the wake of 9/11 were vigorously criticized
by those concerned about the threat to civil liberties posed by such
laws. Such critiques have given rise to the idea of the “surveillance
state” (Greenwald 2015). Perhaps the most extreme and controversial
expression of this trend is the State of Israel’s substantial efforts to
have all levels of Western governments (and other institutions like
universities) pass laws (or rules) criminalizing (or banning) activism
in support of the peaceful Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)
movement begun by representatives of the Palestinian people in 2005
(Greenwald and Fishman 2016).
Moreover, crime demands explanation. “What have you done?”
“What were you thinking?” “Are you out of your mind?” “What
was he thinking?” These look like explanation-seeking questions,
but are typically uttered and heard not so much as questions at all, but
as expressions of shock and horror at the breach of the social order
constituted by the act, including the anticipated awful consequences.
They may be taken as equivalents of “Look at what you’ve done,” “It
was awful” and the like. Nevertheless, explanations are sought. “Why
did you do it?” we might say to the offender. “Why did he do it?”
we might say to one another. “Why did it happen?” the TV news
broadcast might ask. And stock explanations are at hand, depending
on the merest knowledge of the circumstances: jealousy, drunkenness,
revenge, he was high, she’s black, they’re terrorists, how could you not,
revenge, goes with that way of life, just for fun, boys will be boys, evil
bastard, unemployed, crazy guy and so on.
Let us explain what is being done and not done here in reciting
this catalogue of facts about crime.There is no attempt being made to
persuade you that crime is more widespread than you ever imagined,
or to alarm you, thereby to set you up for some wondrous sociology-
based remedy for the consequent anxiety! What is being done here is
simply the sketching of the familiar landscape of crime as a mundane

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fact of everyday life as experienced and understood by members of

society in the course of their daily lives. It’s an attempt to outline the
contours of our everyday, members’, commonsense knowledge of
crime. We can go further. Just think of all the terms and expressions
in language that reference crime. Here’s just a quick list for English:
bank robber, safe cracker, thief, vagrant, jaywalker, trespasser, killer,
shoplifter, con artist, fraudster, vandal, rapist, cheque passer, smuggler,
pirate, juvenile delinquent, felon, hijacker, child abuser, mob boss,
burglar, arsonist, embezzler, forger, drug trafficker, human trafficker,
mugger, kidnapper, wife batterer, blackmailer, terrorist, murderer,
pimp, traitor, stalker, fence. Most of these words or expressions are
the names we give to the persons who commit the corresponding
offence. Some of them have also extended, non-criminal meanings.
As ordinary members of society, we already know about crime in the
sense that we traffic in these terms just by virtue of speaking the lan-
guage. We may not always know whether or not something we have
done or has been done to us or we have witnessed is, in fact, a crime;
but, if crime is involved, we know what other things are implied by
it. These “things,” indeed this “order of things” – to borrow the title
but not the theoretical approach of Michel Foucault’s (2002 [1970])
book – are what this chapter so far is at pains to draw out.
Crimes implicate offenders, victims, witnesses, police, motives,
accomplices, involving statements, confessions, arrests, charges, cus-
tody, jail, courts, trials, exhibits, attorneys, prosecution, defence, judges,
juries, victim impact statements, convicts, prisons, repeat offenders,
ex-cons, retribution, rehabilitation, law and order, homicide rates,
crime problems, crime waves, youth or juvenile crime, street crime,
domestic crime, white-collar crime, corporate crime, violence against
women, crimes against humanity, war crimes, wars against crime,
and so on and so on. This vocabulary of terms and their intercon-
nected definitions form the conceptual landscape which we inhabit
and which inhabits us when we enter this region of language and the
social institutions that it informs and in which it is embedded. “To
give an account of the meaning of a word is to describe how it is used;
and to describe how it is used is to describe the social intercourse
into which it enters” (Winch 2008 [1958]: 115).This landscape maps
out what we can intelligibly say, what we can intelligibly do and
what we can intelligibly be seen to have done in relation to crime.
Or, to change the metaphor, like language generally, crime words

9
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make up a tool-box for getting about in the “crime department” of

social life. “Language is an instrument. Its concepts are instruments”
(Wittgenstein 1972 [1953]: 569; see also Lee 1991; Eglin 2015). The
question of why this essentially philosophical tack is being taken here
brings us to consider why this book is called a sociology of crime. It
requires an examination of what is being meant by “sociology” in
the first place, or, at least, how the term is being used here. And since
sociology produces, or even is, a form of knowledge, we should start
by probing what kind of knowledge we are talking about.

Members’ knowledge of crime

The point of sketching this conceptual landscape – or what the phi-
losopher Ludwig Wittgenstein would have called the “grammar” of
crime – is two-fold. It is, first, to remind you of what we as members
of society already know about the subject matter of this book. The
purpose of doing this is not to state the obvious for its own sake, but
to put on display how much knowledge we already possess about the
subject of crime, knowledge that is expressed in the very language
in and with which we talk about crime. It is, moreover, not so much
substantive knowledge consisting of facts and figures about crime
and criminals, but procedural knowledge about how to think, talk
and proceed in matters criminological. In the philosopher Gilbert
Ryle’s (1949) terms, it is not knowledge that, but knowledge how;
alternatively, “knowledge-in-use” designed for “getting things done”
(Francis and Hester 2004: 17). For example, if you are the victim or
witness of a crime, you know what to do next; that is, how to pro-
ceed.You call the police (rather, say, than rounding up your mates to
exact revenge on the offender – something that is itself a crime). Of
course, you may not call, for all sorts of understandable reasons. But
not doing so is an accountable matter. That is, if you don’t call, you
may well be asked, or will ask yourself or give yourself a reason, why
you didn’t. And if the offence is against someone who is in your care
(as a teacher, doctor, etc.), it may be a further crime not to report the
initial one, just as it is an offence in Canada and elsewhere not to dis-
close to a would-be sexual partner that you are HIV-positive.10 But,
second, it is to make evident that we have acquired this knowledge,
extensive and detailed as it is, and how we have acquired it, before
ever having come into contact with the discipline of sociology.What

10
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crime is, what it can mean for us, how we should act towards it, is
given for us in the language and mores of everyday life. Though the
course for which you are (most probably) reading this book may not
be the first course in sociology that you have taken, the ready recog-
nizability of what you have read so far has in no way depended on
such formal studies. That crime involves offenders and victims, types
of offence and offender, the criminal law, police, courts and correc-
tions is something so obviously the case as possibly to raise in your
mind the question as to why the authors are bothering. What is the
point of telling us what we already know? When are we going to get
to the meat(!), you may well be asking.
In fact, it is wholly typical of standard works in sociology, includ-
ing innumerable introductory textbooks, to use at the beginning of
them a variant version of the way this book’s subject is being intro-
duced. The opening strategy is to present such members’ knowledge
in the form of factual propositions about the subject in question
(knowledge that), to characterize this knowledge as “commonsense
knowledge,” what everyone thinks they know about crime, and then
to contrast it with the “scientific” knowledge of the subject that the
writer, the professional sociologist, is about to impart – what is really
going on (see contributions by Sacks, and Garfinkel, in Hill and
Crittenden 1968: 12–17; Lynch and Bogen 1994: 70; Hutchinson
et al. 2008: 19). “Virtually canonical in these preliminary discussions
is a list of statements describing how sociological knowledge dif-
fers from commonsense belief ” (Lynch and Bogen 1997: 486). For
example, it may be asserted that whereas people commonly think that
assaults are typically carried out in public, at night, by strangers, the
truth is that they mostly occur in private, during the day, by a person
the victim knows. Walter DeKeseredy begins his book on Women,
Crime and the Canadian Criminal Justice System like this:

One does not have to read this book or others like it to discover
that many Canadians see their country as being riddled with preda-
tory violent women and girls. This is largely because on any given
day, newspapers and television stations typically present at least one
sensational story about a terrifying, albeit statistically insignificant,
crime committed by a female, such as Karla Homolka.You will also
often hear some journalists, conservative politicians, and many male
members of the general public contend,“But women do it too!” . . .

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The main objective of this book is to challenge the above and

other myths about female crime in Canada.
(DeKeseredy 2000: vii)

The same stance is evident in DeKeseredy’s more recent book Violence

Against Women: Myths, Facts, Controversies (2011). He is far from alone
in adopting this position.
Perspicuous examples of such contrasts can be found at the begin-
ning of such luminaries’ works as Émile Durkheim’s Suicide (1951
[1897]: 41–42), Paul Lazarsfeld’s “expository review” of The American
Soldier (1949: 380) and George Homans’s Social Behaviour (1961; see
Turner 1974: 9–10), not to mention Robert Merton’s “Now the case
for sociology” (1961), Donald Cressey’s “Crime” (1966) and Potter
and Kappeler’s Constructing Crime (1998: 12–13; see Chapter 4 in this
book), and notoriously, perhaps, in Durkheim’s (1982 [1895]) argu-
ment for the functional value of crime and the criminal that we take
up in Chapter 3.
In fact, the practice of distinguishing between common sense and
science gives rise to the equivalent distinction between the knowl-
edge of the ordinary person and that of the expert or, to use the
words of the sociologist Harvey Sacks (1972a), between the knowl-
edge of the “layperson” and that of the “professional.” Indeed, it may
be said that the professional’s claim to professional status rests on
being able to show that their knowledge is different from, not to say
better than, that of the “layperson” (Cuff 1994 [1980]). Founded in
the Gospel of St Matthew 5: 21–22 – “Ye have heard it said . . . But I
say unto you . . .” – this stance has been called “revelatory” (Giddens
1977: 166, 10–11). The professional sociologist will reveal the reality,
if not the design, emanating from the “mind of God,” that lies beneath
the surface of appearances in everyday life (Goldthorpe 1973: 455–
458), including beneath the vague, imprecise and ambiguous uses
of language said to be found in “popular speech” (Durkheim 1951
[1897]: 41–42; Cressey 1966: 141; Porter 1967: 6). The justification
of quantitative sociology rests on the assumption that the observable
world of appearances is a poor reflection of the “real world” beneath
the surface that only in its general outlines (both of distribution and
trend) is detectable in the observable appearances (Barrett 1978: 52).
With it comes the correlative assumption that it is only the theories
and specialized methods – preferably quantitative ones like survey

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research – of the professional social scientist that can reveal the order
in the mess of observable particulars. Again, referring to introductory
textbooks, Lynch and Bogen (1997) write:

The contrast between science and commonsense usually plays two

roles in the overall structure of the text. First, it counters the com-
monplace view of sociology as little more than a ‘science of the
obvious’ . . .; second, it demonstrates the importance of rigorous
empirical methods for establishing the special status of sociological
knowledge.
(Lynch and Bogen 1997: 486)

For a further example, but from a different theoretical tradition, con-

sider how William Chambliss, the great Marxist sociologist of crime,
begins the first chapter of his co-edited book with Marjorie Zatz. He
points out that “[t]here are literally thousands of laws enacted each
year” in the United States. It is “a very prolific enterprise, the business
of making law” (Chambliss 1993a: 3). Laws are passed by all levels of
government, for a variety of purposes and reflecting varying inter-
ests. They are numerous and various. “Despite this, however, there
remains the need for generalization to aid understanding” (1993a: 3),
he then writes, reflecting the “craving for generality” that is the sine
qua non of accredited professional sociology. Indeed, “generalization
and theory-building . . . are fundamental aspects of scientific enquiry,”
according to noted British sociologist of crime David Garland
(1997: 209, note 29). Such specialized, general knowledge is what
the professional sociologist claims to have over the “lay” member of
society. It is important to understand the significance that this distinc-
tion has for sociology and for the structure and perspective of this
book.
In contrast to the view outlined in the previous paragraphs, we
are arguing here and throughout this book that members’ knowl-
edge of crime is the beginning and end, the ground and the edifice
of sociology’s relationship to crime: “the common-sense knowl-
edge of everyday life is the unquestioned but always questionable
background within which inquiry starts and within which alone it
can be carried out” (Schutz 1962a [1954]: 57). Put differently, “The
construction of the categories and models of the social sciences is
founded on the pre-scientific common-sense experience of social

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reality” (Schutz 1962b [1953]: 21, quoted in Kim and Berard 2009:
271). Or, in its classical formulation:

The thought objects constructed by the social scientists refer to

and are founded upon the thought objects constructed by the
common-sense thought of man living his everyday life among his
fellow-men.Thus, the constructs used by the social scientist are, so
to speak, constructs of the second degree, namely constructs of the
constructs made by the actors on the social scene.
(Schutz 1962b [1953]: 6)

Professional sociological accounts of crime already presuppose and

depend on lay sociological accounts of crime, even as they strive
to be different from them. The chapters of this text are at pains to
show that the theories of crime that are produced by professional
sociologists and that fill the pages of this book (and countless other
textbooks in the field) are underpinned by and hopelessly embedded
in the very members’ knowledge of crime they purport to supersede.
To say this is not to set out a brief for making invidious comparisons
between lay and professional sociological accounts of crime (that
traditionally have always been made in order to show the superiority
of the professional account). Nor is it to debunk professional accounts
in favour of good ol’ common sense (Atkinson 1978). For both of
these moves depend on assuming that the two kinds of accounts and
their respective forms of knowledge are equivalent “enterprises” with
equivalent ends and means that can be compared on the same scale.
But to suppose this is to miss their essential differences (Schutz 1962b
[1953]; Garfinkel 1967: 262–283; Sharrock and Anderson 1991). It
is to miss just what is special about (purportedly) scientific accounts
of social phenomena like crime, just what is special about science
in the first place, about how it departs from the rationality that informs
the conduct of everyday life in which “lay” sociological accounts of
crime have their home and being. The departure consists of seeking
theoretical accounts that will apply universally irrespective of time
and place, whereas lay sociologists deal in practical accounts that will
apply here and now for the practical purposes at hand (Sharrock and
Anderson 2011 [1986]: 33; Francis and Hester 2004: 17). As a result,
the “common-sense and scientific attitudes are not so much in con-
flict with one another, as they are incongruous, to the extent that the

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systematic substitution of either for the other would be disruptive”

(Sharrock and Anderson 1991: 60).
What follows from this is that it is both crucial to understand pro-
fessional sociological theories of crime in their own terms and to
appreciate in just what ways they are and are not applicable to under-
standing the conduct of everyday affairs in the world where crime
happens. Moreover, to the extent that such theories of crime do man-
age to have some purchase on the nature of actual social life, it can be
shown that the currency of that life is always already inhabiting them.
We must not “forget that students of social problems are masters of the
vernacular (that is, they are members) before they begin their studies”
(Bogen and Lynch 1993: 230) and that their professional sociological
“accounts are produced and justified as further versions [of members’
accounts] that have their own rhetorical and practical uses” (Bogen
and Lynch 1993: 219, emphasis in original; see also Lynch 2008: 716).
To come back to the question of “where’s the meat?” the answer
is, you’ve already swallowed it.The task is to regurgitate it in order to
examine its entrails, for, to butcher Keats, “it’s all ye know on earth
and all ye need to know.” To put this more politely, less prophetically
and less cryptically, the particular vision of professional sociological
inquiry on offer here, in contrast to the one sketched above, is one in
which the purpose of inquiry is understood to be not the discovery
of knowledge, but the recovery of what we already know – “assem-
bling reminders” about it, in Wittgenstein’s (1972 [1953]: para. 127)
phrase – where that knowledge is knowledge how (Sharrock 2001:
258; Lynch 2007: 108). As Sharrock and Button say in the conclusion
to their remarkable essay on “the social actor”:

The determination to identify ‘common-sense understandings’ is

not meant to result in reiteration of those understandings for their
own sake, but in a context which gives a more perspicuous view of
their part in everyday activities and, also cogently, in the work of
sociological theorists themselves.
(Sharrock and Button 1991: 167)

The two sociologies

The fundamental idea informing the approach being taken in this
textbook to the subject of sociology and crime is that members of

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society are sociologists just by virtue of being members of society.To

put it another way, doing sociology is constitutive of being a member
of society. Members of society may be said to be engaged in socio-
logical inquiry as they make their way about the everyday world, and
as a condition of doing so competently. Sociological inquiry is being
carried out as one selects what to wear upon getting dressed in the
morning, as one navigates the route to school or work by vehicle or
on foot, talks to or texts friends on the phone, organizes one’s activi-
ties for the day, chats to class- or work-mates, manages conversation
with parents over dinner and so on (Francis and Hester 2004: 1).
Don’t be confused. We are all used to thinking of sociology as, and
only as, the name of a social science, a discipline, taught in schools,
colleges and universities in formal courses of study, a subject to be
learned from teachers in classrooms or online, from textbooks and
journal articles or other such course materials written by specialists,
usually professors, and through the acquisition and use of specialized
research methods. Fair enough. Call this “professional sociology” done
by “professional sociologists,” like this book and its authors. But, fol-
lowing the ideas of the professional sociologist Harold Garfinkel, we
may speak of “members’ methods of sociological inquiry” (Garfinkel
and Sacks 1970: 341–345). What does this mean?

Members’ methods of sociological inquiry

One way to come at this is via the concept of socialization. Instead

of treating it as the name of a social process required by a profes-
sional sociological theory of the social system to account for the
transmission of fundamental values between generations, think of
its transitive verb form “socialize” like this: social-ize, to make social.
How does one “make things social” as one goes about one’s daily
affairs? Well, consider, for example, how one sees “a family waiting for
the bus.” Notice that clusters of people don’t necessarily announce
themselves as such. They may have to be “seen” as such. To do so
involves attributing a set of identities to the collection of people
in question (that they are a “family” made up of such categories as
“father,” “mother,” “son” and “daughter”), seeing them as engaged in
what Max Weber (2013 [1922]: 5) calls “rationally purposeful action”
(“waiting for the bus”), seeing the pole on the edge of the sidewalk
with the plate with numbers on it as the “bus stop,” assuming that

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the witnessed scene is just what it appears to be (and not the set of a
film or play) and so on. Notice, too, that the phrase “waiting for the
bus” is both a description and explanation of the action in question;
the people involved are seen to be waiting, and why they are wait-
ing is because they want to get on the bus (which will take them
to where they are going; in other words, we take it that they have a
destination). To attribute such social identities to people and to see
them as engaged in actions for a reason or purpose is to “socialize”
the scene, to make it social, to do a sociology on it. For a clear and
cogent analysis of “aspects of members’ ethnographic work in making
[their] setting observable and reportable” (Sharrock and Turner 1980:
29) see the analysis by these authors of the way a caller to the police
describes the parked automobile that is the object and subject of her
concern.
And, notice also, we see such things at a glance, without the need
for an interview. That is to say, in the world of everyday life, one, as
it were, takes up the work of being a member of society and sees,
and acts towards, the world accordingly. Others are seen, according
to such things as the (social) time and place of their being encoun-
tered, as workers, shoppers, students, beggars, business people, tourists,
etc. That is, allowing for a “restricted class” of categories that are
“routinely ‘emblematically assignable,’ or ‘perceptually recordable’
at a glance” such as police officers, “nuns, hospital physicians,” etc.
(Coulter 2001: 37; see also Jayyusi 1984: 68–73), people don’t just
appear before us bearing a label with their category identity stamped
upon it in large lettering.We see who they are by such things as when
and where we encounter them and what activities they are engaged
in (Eglin 1980).Thus, persons observable as “taking in the sights” can
be seen as “tourists.” By virtue of the time of day, persons observable
as “finishing up the job” or “driving home from work” may be seen as
“workers.” Because of their institutional location, persons observable
as “on their way to or from class” may be seen as “students.”
And if you are inclined to say, “Well, what’s the big deal, that’s
just who they are, and that’s just what they are doing,” then it needs
to be said that while the people and actions concerned may very
well be describable in terms of those categories – that is, while such
descriptions may be perfectly correct – it is also the case that they
can be described as children (all of them), as males, females and oth-
ers, as persons of tall, medium and short height, and, mutatis mutandis,

17
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as hockey players, lovers, baseball fans, drivers, readers, walkers and

so on (Schegloff 1997: 165; 1991: 51; see also Coulter 2001: 35 for a
lucid presentation of this point). What make them observable, on this
occasion, as shoppers, workers and so on, who are going about the
business of shopping and working, are the relevances that participants
in the world of everyday life find and bring to the scenes through
which they move. Such relevances are socially derived, socially organ-
ized and socially ordered on the occasions that they are brought to
bear. That the family waiting for the bus is observable as such, and
not as people loitering on the sidewalk, or a group of singers about
to become a flash mob, or a terrorist cell in training is, as ethnometh-
odology is wont to say, an interactional accomplishment of the parties
present via their use of practical reasoning based on their common-
sense knowledge of social structures. Put differently, it is the product
of members’ methods of sociological inquiry.
For a further example, consider one of the reported descriptions
made by students upon the entry of the visibly armed Marc Lépine
into one of the classrooms of l’École Polytechnique in Montréal in
which, on 6 December 1989, he subsequently shot dead 13 women
engineering students (and a female member of the administrative
staff): “we thought it was a joke.” These students attempted, that is,
“to normalize his appearance by invoking an available feature of the
context, namely that this was the last class of the term in this course
and someone was exploiting the occasion to stage a prank or joke”
(Eglin and Hester 2003: 36; see also Mahood 1996: 356).That is, they
“socialized the scene” by invoking a collection of social-organizational
features of the institution of which they were part, namely a university
with its courses, assigned rooms, timetable, course organization (with
such things as “first” and “last” class meetings and what may conven-
tionally occur in them) and so on, in order to render what they were
witnessing as an intelligible part of the setting; that is, as a university
event. This involved attributing to the interloper a setting-relevant
identity, namely “student,” and his action as the setting-relevant one
of “staging a prank.” That is, they did a sociology on the situation
which entailed ascribing an identity-category to the interloper (as
to themselves) with its associated predicates (in this case, a reason for
action).
Subsequently, in different contexts, Lépine and the students whom
he killed were re-categorized (re-described) in crime-constitutive

18
1: SOCIOLOGY

terms (offender and victims), gendered terms (man and women) and
political terms (anti-feminist terrorist and feminists).These categori-
zations provided the resources out of which disputes were constructed
about what the “Montreal Massacre” amounted to as social action,
for participants, for news reporters, for media commentators and for
subsequent academic, professional sociological analysis. That is, the
language of description – in this case, the categories and descriptors
used to refer to the people and actions concerned – provided for
what could be intelligibly said about them. This included that what
he had done could be seen as a terrible crime.

The book’s perspective: explicating the grammar

of social action
As should be becoming evident, while endeavouring to be a textbook
and not a monograph, this work does employ a particular perspec-
tive from which to approach its subject matter. What is being called
here a “grammatical perspective” is derived from the language
philosophy of Wittgenstein (Coulter 1979: 2–5; 1973), the ethno-
methodology of Garfinkel (Sharrock and Coleman 1999: 29) and
the membership categorization analysis of Sacks (Eglin 2015; Button
1991: 8), the last of which we take up in detail below (see also Berard
1998: 193–195). For Wittgenstein (1972 [1953]: para 373),“[g]rammar
tells us what kind of object anything is.” Put differently, “‘grammar’
comprises the rules for the use of a concept in our language” (Coulter
2016: 1). Thus we may speak of “logical grammar” or “conceptual
grammar.” From him, we adopt the concepts of family resemblance,
language game, forms of life and regions of language.We learn not to
ask for the meaning of words, but to look for their use in interaction.
We “renounce the ‘craving for generality’” embedded in positivistic
inquiry (Lynch 2001: 148, note 18; Hutchinson et al. 2008: chapter 3;
Wittgenstein 1965 [1958]: 17, 18) and Marxist dialectics (Chambliss,
in the previous section, p. 13), and seek instead to assemble remind-
ers about the knowledge we have, but take for granted and so do
not readily see. Furthermore, we seek not to solve sociology’s prob-
lems, but to dissolve them by showing that they typically arise when
“language goes on holiday” and we forget where its natural home
is (Wittgenstein 1972 [1953]: para. 38, emphasis in original; Winch
2008 [1958]; Pitkin 1972; Coulter 2001: 33):

19
 1: SOCIOLOGY

[A] major methodological problem for social science is its prac-

tice of making use of the language of naturally occurring social
processes by extracting terms from their contexts of use and incor-
porating them into the social scientific discourse as theoretical
concepts or categories identifying features of a social world.
(Smith 1983: 309)

Since Chapter 6 of this book is devoted to ethnomethodology (and

conversation analysis), we will not describe its analytic mentality
here other than to note that Garfinkel’s central recommendations
are very akin to Wittgenstein’s (Hughes 1977: 736; Sharrock and
Anderson 1991: 62; Button and Sharrock 1993: 16–17; Lynch 2007:
107). Ethnomethodology’s “key assumption is that the production of
observable social activities involves the local and situated use of mem-
bers’ methods for doing such activities [and that] with respect to these
methods, the mastery of natural language is paramount” (Francis and
Hester 2004: 20). Moreover, like Wittgenstein’s philosophical inves-
tigations, Garfinkel’s “ethnomethodology offers a valuable form of
therapy for social theorists” (Lynch 2001: 147).

Both were indifferent to the project of reforming or correcting

‘common sense’ with constructed logical languages or (in the case
of sociology) explanatory models, and both were more interested
in explicating practical actions in ordinary as well as professional
settings.
(Lynch 2016: 11, footnote 5)

Together these ideas entail the view, as stated above, that the ordinary,
everyday life we live with and among others is not just “social” in
character, but fundamentally sociological.That is, sociology is not simply
the name of the specialized conceptual and methodological apparatus
brought to the analysis of social life by professional practitioners of
an academic discipline called sociology, but is a collection of such
practices that all members of society engage in as a condition of living
everyday life. “The study of common sense knowledge and common
sense activities consists of treating as problematic phenomena the
actual methods whereby members of society, doing sociology, lay or
professional, make the social structures of everyday activities observ-
able” (Garfinkel 1967: 75). By “everyday life” or “everyday activities”

20
1: SOCIOLOGY

is meant all of social life lived under the auspices of what phenom-
enologists call the “natural attitude” or the “attitude of every­day life,”
whether in everyday or specialized settings. Moreover, professional
sociology is underpinned by this lay sociology.
This approach entails the view that, far from being deficient in
terms of professional sociology’s formal theoretical schemes for
explaining social action, persons’ actions can routinely be seen to be
intelligible in terms of the practical circumstances with which they
engage. Furthermore, insofar as “language is understood as practical
action” (Lynch 2014: 112, note 19) then, “following Wittgenstein,
persons’ actual usages are rational usages in some ‘language game.’
What is their game?” (Garfinkel 1967: 70, emphasis in original).
Garfinkel might have better said, “What is that game?” Because “a
language-game is any array of human activities within which the
use of language is embedded,” then no language game is “anyone’s
singular ‘possession’” (Coulter 2016: 2).

Membership categorization and the identification of crime

If Wittgenstein is the source of the idea that social action is linguistic

in character, and Garfinkel shows us how it is oriented to local, practi-
cal circumstances, then in Sacks’s membership categorization analysis
(MCA), we gain an entrance to how members of society organ-
ize the production and recognition of their actions in terms of the
occasioned relationships among categories for referring to persons
and the features that may be predicated of those categories. We have
already provided a non-technical version of MCA in the vignettes
portrayed above of the family waiting for the bus and the scene
from the Montreal Massacre. The observable intelligibility of these
scenes of action turned on the relationships between the member-
ship categories used to refer to the parties involved – family (and its
constituent categories), shoppers, workers, students – and the features
predicated of them – waiting for the bus together, staging a prank.
When it comes to crime, we said above that the fact “that crime may
be got away with means that it is not a naturally self-revealing thing.
It must be shown to be such.” In other words, members of society
must have some methods by which they are able to identify actions,
actors and settings as criminal in the first place.This issue is important
for two reasons:

21
 1: SOCIOLOGY

1. It is a methodological problem for the professional sociological

researcher in the sense that if he or she is to investigate crimes and
criminals, then some practical solution to the problem of locating
instances of this phenomenon for study must be achieved.
2. It is also a problem for member-participants themselves; how am
I to know that what I am observing is crime?
For both professional researcher and lay participant in the crime
identification enterprise, the problem is how to produce such iden-
tifications recognizably or, in Garfinkel’s (1967) sense, “accountably”;
that is, “observably-reportably” (see Chapter 6 in this book for an
explication of these terms).
Here, then, we shall be describing some methods for producing
and recognizing identifications of (or references to or descriptions
of) crime. The significance of these methods is that the intelligibility
of identifications of crime and therefore of criminology (or profes-
sional sociology of crime) as a discipline depends upon them. Unless
persons are able to produce recognizable references to crime, and
unless those who interact with them can recognize them as refer-
ences to crime, then intelligible talk about and action in relation
to crime would be impossible. We therefore show how studies of
the identification of crime involve members’ methods of member-
ship categorization for recognizing identifications of, or references
to, crime. These methods involve the use of members’ knowledge of
acts, actors and their contexts, organized, in ethnomethodological
terms, as membership categorization devices, membership catego-
ries and category predicates.Thus,“arresting,”“judging,”“punishing,”
“stealing,” etc. are only intelligible in the light and use of “what eve-
rybody knows about crime.” The intelligibility of these activities
depends upon this knowledge, which, we argue, can be analyzed as an
organization of members’ methods of membership categorization.
A convenient source of data that we shall use in order to examine
the production and recognition of intelligible references to crime
consists of news headlines about crime. As we saw at the begin-
ning of this chapter, news sources, including newspapers, routinely
contain numerous reports on the latest crimes to be reported and
dealt with by the police and the courts. We – and we take it, you
– have no trouble in understanding them as reports about crime
and the consequent activities of the law enforcers. However, our
suggestion here is that the apparent ease with which we recognize

22
1: SOCIOLOGY

them as such reports rests upon our unnoticed use of certain sense-
making methods or interpretative procedures. Such methods are
the focus of ethnomethodology. Since most of us encounter crime
most commonly in the form of media depictions of it, and since
much is made in professional sociology about the news media’s “con-
struction” of crime through their reporting and commentary on it,
it is fitting perhaps to begin the book by showing how our pre-
ferred approach treats the subject in its “media-ted” manifestation.
We shall use the following case of a newspaper headline to bring
out how its reading depends on some general methods of sense-
making available to any competent members of society picking up a
newspaper.

MOTHER CHARGED IN DEATH OF CHILD

Our original analysis of this headline in the first edition of this book
(Hester and Eglin 1992: 119–128) was revised and expanded by
Francis and Hester in An Invitation to Ethnomethodology (2004: 37–44)
as an example of that mode of ethnomethodological analysis they call
self-reflection. The analysis presented here is a summary version of
their revision of our original. Such an analysis requires taking three
methodological steps (Francis and Hester 2004: 25–26):
1. Notice something that is observably-the-case about some talk,
activity or setting.
2. Pose the question: “How is it that this observable feature has been
produced, such that it is recognizable for what it is?”
3. Consider, analyze and describe the methods used in the produc-
tion and recognition of the observable feature.
Step 1: imagine you see this headline on the front page of the news-
paper. What do you take it to be saying in the quite ordinary way
that you read a newspaper? We take it, and we take it that you take
it, to mean that a mother killed her child (most probably a baby or
young infant) and as a result, was arrested and charged by the police.
Notice that the headline doesn’t say this in so many words and, if you
stretch your imagination, you can think up other possible meanings.
So, let us spell out what our “obvious” reading consists of (and what
it doesn’t) (Francis and Hester 2004: 38):
1. that the mother is the mother of the dead child (and is not
someone else’s mother);

23
 1: SOCIOLOGY

2. that the mother was charged by the police (and not [by] someone
or something else);
3. that the child was killed by its mother (and not by someone else).
Step 2: how do we come up with this reading? What methods of
practical reasoning, involving what commonsense knowledge of the
social structures, have gone into both the production and recognition
of this story in this headline? How do we see that this, after all, is a
crime story, that it’s about a crime?
Step 3: the general answer that professional MCA gives is that to
do so, we, as ordinary members of society reading the newspaper,
engage in membership categorization analysis ourselves. In other
words, MCA has two senses. It refers both to lay “members’ methods
of sociological inquiry” and to the form of analysis that professional
ethnomethodologists carry out on the MCA carried out by lay mem-
bers of society. Of what does members’ MCA consist in the case of
this headline? To answer this question, we shall employ the concep-
tual framework of professional MCA bequeathed to us by Harvey
Sacks (1967, 1972a, 1972b, 1992a, 1992b), and practitioners influ-
enced by his work, chiefly Watson (1976, 1978, 1983), Payne (1976),
Jayyusi (1984) and others (Eglin and Hester 1992, 2003; Hester and
Eglin 1997).
“Membership categories” are classifications or social types used to
describe persons. Examples include “mother,”“father,”“son,”“daugh-
ter,” “hockey player,” “hell’s angel,” “musician,” “scholar,” “lunatic,”
“bore,” etc. Our knowledge of the world is informed by such cat-
egories: “they provide a means for us to make sense of the social
world” (Francis and Hester 2004: 39). We will introduce the other
terms as we work through an abbreviated account of the analysis of
our reading of the headline. For a full analysis, readers should turn to
Francis and Hester’s account.

Reading the mother as the mother of the dead child

It seems natural to us in terms of our commonsense knowledge of

society to read mother and child as going together as a pair of cat-
egories. Sacks thought of categories “going together” in the form of
collections like that of “family.” Although not all actual families will
have incumbents of every category, we know that mother, father,
son, daughter, aunt, uncle, cousin and so on are such a collection

24
1: SOCIOLOGY

of categories. As well as being categories in the family collection,

“mother” and “child” may be said to form a particular pair of cat-
egories, namely “parent–child,” a case of what Sacks (1972a) calls
“standardized relational pairs.” Other such pairs are wife–husband,
boyfriend–girlfriend, teacher–student, doctor–patient and so on.

To say that such pairs are standardized means that it is known what
the typical rights, obligation, activities, attributes and so forth are of
the one part with respect to the other . . . Furthermore, mention
of one part of such a pair is to imply the other – to have the other
programmatically present.
(Francis and Hester 2004: 40)

Such categories and collections provide us with means of describing

persons and their actions. Sacks held that they are commonly used
in conformity with certain rules of application. A collection plus its
rules of application constitutes a “membership categorization device”
(MCD). One such rule of application, the “consistency rule,” holds
that:

if some population of persons is being categorized, and if a cat-

egory from some device’s collection has been used to categorize a
first Member of the population, then that category or other cat-
egories of the same collection may be used to categorize further
Members of the population.
(Sacks 1972a: 33, emphasis in original; 1972b: 333)

From this, Sacks derived a corollary he calls a “hearer’s maxim”: “if

two or more categories are used to categorize two or more members
of some population, and those categories can be heard as categories
from the same collection, then: Hear them that way” (Sacks 1972b:
333). The now famous example in Sacks’s work is the small child’s
story beginning, “the baby cried, the mommy picked it up.” Here,
using the hearer’s maxim, the two categories “baby” and “mommy”
used to categorize the two persons may be, and are routinely and
commonsensically, heard as both belonging to the collection “fam-
ily” and, by virtue of what Sacks calls the “duplicative organization”
property, as belonging to the same family. It is by virtue of this prop-
erty, together with their constituting a standardized relational pair,

25
 1: SOCIOLOGY

that we take it that the mother and child in the headline are mother
and child to each other.

Reading the mother as having been charged by the police

A second observation is that the headline does not say that the
mother was charged by the “police,” but we read it that way. This
is because of our “orientation to category predicates.” Sacks speaks,
in particular, about “category-bound activities.” These are activities
(or, perhaps better, actions) that are expectably and properly done by
persons who are the incumbents of particular categories, when those
categories are drawn from certain collections or MCDs. Subsequent
researchers have extended Sacks’s work in this area. Sharrock (1974),
Payne (1976),Watson (1978, 1983), Jayyusi (1984) and Hester (1992),
for example, have all observed that category-bound activities are
just one class of predicates which “can conventionally be imputed
on the basis of a given membership category” (Watson 1978: 106).
Other predicates include rights, expectations, obligations, knowledge,
attributes and competences. Thus, “charging” is an activity bound
to or predicated of such a membership category. When we read of
“charging,” there are, hypothetically at least, several possibilities.

Someone may, for example, be charged for being overdrawn at

their bank. Alternatively, in the context of a bull ring a bull-fighter
may quite properly be charged by a bull. However, we have no
difficulty in understanding the sense in which this word is being
used in this headline, that is, someone is being charged with a
crime or offence.
(Francis and Hester 2004: 42)

We assume it means “charged by the police” because charging is

something properly and expectably done by the police. The orienta-
tion to category predicates permits the inference that the reference
to “charged” is a description of an activity done by the police to
an offender, and not, say, a reference to the activities of an animal
renowned for such behaviour or a bank enforcing its rules on a
client. This is because there is an inferential relationship between
membership categories and their predicates. It is possible to infer
a category from a predicate. Thus, to describe someone as “getting

26
1: SOCIOLOGY

a divorce” permits the inference that they are incumbents of the

membership category “married person”; to say of someone that they
“issued a prescription” implies that they are incumbents of the mem-
bership category “doctor.” In the context of our headline, we can
infer a membership category, namely “police,” from the mention of
the action “charge” because “charging” is something this category
of persons typically and properly does; it is an activity which is bound
to or predicated of this membership category, so that mention of the
activity provides for the commonsense inference that this is charging
done by the police in relation to some alleged offence.

Reading that the child was killed by its mother

If we have taken it that the mother is the mother of the dead child, and
that the mother has been charged by the police, then “it seems reason-
able that it is she who has killed her child, rather than some unnamed
category of person. This is so because the police . . . charge people
because they have committed offences” (Francis and Hester 2004:
42). Sacks provides a formal way of linking police and offender, and
charging and offending.Thus, in the making sense of any description,
we make use of the principle of “co-selection”:

One general method or procedure available to members is to hear

words as collections or co-selections. That is to say, members can
hear any word as a co-selection with the words which precede
and follow it. The parts of an utterance can be heard as mutually
constitutive in that how any part is heard can depend upon, among
other things, how other parts are heard. It is the speaking and hear-
ing of words as co-selections which helps to constitute situations
to be observably what they are.
(Payne 1976: 35)

Speakers and hearers, then, assume that words are consistently co-
selected (something postmodernists do not appear to have grasped;
see Part IV of this book). This means that it is taken for granted
that words are not chosen randomly or incoherently, but instead are
selected because they cohere and are consistent with each other.They
are designed to “go together” as selections which inform or mutu-
ally elaborate the meaning of each other. In terms of the consistency

27
 1: SOCIOLOGY

rule, the co-selected items composing the description are heard to go

together, if they can be heard that way.
In accomplishing a sense of the word “charged” as being “charged
by the police,” the method of co-selection “works” not only in con-
junction with the orientation to category predicates that we have
already described above, but also with a method called the “orientation
to ‘standardized relational pairs’” (SRPs) (Sacks 1972a: 37) introduced
above. Payne describes this method in the following way:“In our cul-
ture, certain categories are routinely recognized as paired categories,
and the pairing is recognized to incorporate standardized relation-
ships of rights, obligations and expectations” (Payne 1976: 36).These
SRPs include not only the “intimate” pairings of “husband–wife,”
“parent–child,” “girlfriend–boyfriend,” etc., but also those relevant in
certain “institutional” settings, such as doctor–patient, lawyer–client,
master–slave, teacher–pupil, shopkeeper–customer, victim–offender,
judge–defendant and police officer–offender or suspect. Each mem-
ber of these pairings implies the other, so that mention of the one
makes relevant the other. If, in some stretch of talk, reference is made
to one member of the pair, and if mention is made of another person
who could be heard as the incumbent of a category paired with the
first, then, in line with the consistency rule, “hear it that way.”
Just as membership categories can be relationally paired, so also can
their predicates. Examples of this include the buying and selling in
the customer–shopkeeper relationship and the teaching and learning
in the teacher–student pairing. Furthermore, predicates may stand for
their relationally paired membership categories such that through a
substitution procedure, a category may be implied by or inferred from
mention of the predicate of a category with which it is paired or vice
versa.Thus, to say of someone that they have been “arrested,” permits
the inference that this has been performed by a “law enforcer” and
that they, therefore, are an incumbent of the category “offender.”
Category-bound activities of this sort, then, may be said to be done
by incumbents of a particular category to the incumbents of catego-
ries with which they are “relationally paired.” In particular, in the
case of the membership category “police,” “charging” is relationally
paired with “offending,” an activity bound to the membership cat-
egory “offender.” If there is reference to such a paired category, then
our sense of “charging” as an activity performed by the police can be
confirmed. Though there is no direct reference to an “offender,” it

28
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 Käytävä, jota myöten juoksin, vei jokseenkin suoraan melkoisen
matkan, päättyen kiertoportaiden juurelle. Riensin niitä pitkin
ylöspäin ja olin pian tornin ensimmäisessä kerroksessa olevassa
pyöreässä huoneessa.

Siellä oli toistakymmentä punaista orjaa puhdistamassa ja

korjaamassa keltaisten sotilaiden aseita. Pitkin seiniä oli telineitä,
joissa oli sadoittain suoria ja koukkupäisiä miekkoja, heittokeihäitä ja
tikareja. Ilmeisesti olin saapunut asevarastoon. Vain kolme sotilasta
oli vartioimassa työntekijöitä.

Yhdellä silmäyksellä olin selvillä asemasta. Täällä oli yllin kyllin

aseita! Täällä oli jänteviä punaisia sotilaita niitä käyttelemään!

Ja nyt oli täällä myöskin Heliumin prinssi John Carter, joka tarvitsi
sekä aseita että sotilaita!

Kun astuin huoneeseen, näkivät sekä vartijat että vangit minut

yhtaikaa.

Aivan sen oven vierellä, jossa seisoin, oli telineellä suoria

miekkoja, ja tarttuessani sieltä tempaamani säilän kahvaan osui
katseeni kahteen rinnakkain työskentelevään vankiin.

Eräs vartijoista syöksähti minua kohti. "Kuka olet?" hän kiljui. "Mitä
asiaa sinulla on tänne?"

"Olen tullut noutamaan Heliumin jeddakia Tartos Morsia ja hänen

poikaansa Mors Kajakia", huudahdin osoittaen äskenmainittuja
punaisia vankeja, jotka nyt olivat hypähtäneet seisoalleen silmät
levällään hämmästyksestä tuntiessaan minut.
 "Nouskaa, punaiset miehet! Jättäkäämme ennen kuolemaamme
Okarin
tyrannin palatsiin itsestämme muisto, joka pysyy kautta aikojen
Kadabran historian lehdillä kohottaen Heliumin mainetta ja kunniaa!"
Olin näet pannut merkille, että kaikki täällä olevat vangit olivat
Tardos Morsin laivastoon kuuluneita miehiä.

Samassa oli ensimmäinen vartiosotilas kimpussani ja taistelu alkoi,

mutta tuskin olivat säilämme sattuneet vastakkain, kun näin, että
punaiset orjat olivat kahlehditut kiinni lattiaan.
KOLMASTOISTA LUKU

Magneettivipu

Vartiosotilaat eivät välittäneet vähääkään vangeistaan, sillä

punaiset miehet eivät päässeet yhtä askelta kauemmaksi jykevistä
renkaista, joihin heidät oli kiinnitetty, vaikkakin he kaikki olivat
tarttuneet aseeseen, jota kukin parhaillaan oli minun saapuessani
käsitellyt, ja olivat valmiina liittymään minuun, jos vain voisivat.

Keltaiset sotilaat ahdistivat kaikki minua, mutta pian he saivat

huomata, ettei heitä kolmisinkaan ollut suinkaan liikaa puolustamaan
asevarastoa John Carteria vastaan. Jospa oma kelpo säiläni olisi ollut
silloin kädessäni! Mutta näinkin ollen annoin kunnostani tyydyttävän
näytteen keltaisten miesten oudolla aseella.

Aluksi minulla oli täysi työ torjuessani heidän tuhoisia

koukkumiekkojaan. Mutta minuutin, parin kuluttua sain temmatuksi
seinävierellä olevalta telineeltä toisen suoran miekan, jolla väistelin
vastustajieni koukkuja eivätkä aseeni sitten enää olleet niin paljoa
heikommat kuin heidän.
 Kun kaikki kolme kävivät yhdessä kimppuuni, sain kiittää vain
onnellista sattumaa siitä, etten sortunut hyvin nopeasti surman
suuhun. Minun oli pakko peräytyä seinää vasten, ja sitten tähtäsi
yksi keltaihoisista koukullaan tuhoisan otteen kupeeseeni. Mutta kun
astahdin sivulle ja kohotin käteni, niin hänen aseensa vain hipaisi
kylkeäni ja sattui takanani olevaan telineeseen, johon se sotkeutui.

Ennenkuin hän ennätti irroittaa säiläänsä, lävistin hänet. Sitten

turvauduin samaan taktiikkaan, joka on tiukassa paikassa pelastanut
minut satoja kertoja, hyökkäsin jäljellä olevien vastustajieni
kimppuun ja pakotin heidät peräytymään jaellen iskuja ja pistoja
satamalla ja antaen säiläni kieppua heidän miekkojensa ympäri,
kunnes heidät valtasi kuolemanpelko.

Sitten alkoi heistä toinen huutaa apua, mutta se oli liian myöhäistä
heidän pelastumisekseen.

Nyt voin käsitellä heitä mieleni mukaan ja ahdistin heitä puolelta ja

toiselta, kunnes he olivat haluamassani kohdassa — kahlehdittujen
orjien miekkojen ulottuvissa. Pian viruivat molemmat kuolleina
lattialla. Mutta heidän huutonsa eivät olleet menneet aivan hukkaan,
sillä nyt kuului vastaushuhuilua, juoksevien miesten askelten
töminää, varustusten kalahtelua ja upseerien komennuksia.

"Ovi! Nopeasti, John Carter, telkeä ovi!" kiljaisi Tardos Mors.

Näimme vartiosotilaita jo kiitävän ovesta näkyvän pihan poikki.

Muutamissa sekunneissa he olisivat tornissa. Yhdellä

harppauksella olin vankalla ovella ja paiskasin sen kumahtaen kiinni.

"Salpa!" kajahdutti Tardos Mors.

 Koetin laskea jykevää tankoa paikoilleen, mutta ponnistelin
turhaan.

"Nosta sitä vähän, niin että haka pääsee irti!" huusi eräs toinen
punainen vanki.

Kuulin keltaisten sotilaiden juoksevan kiveyksellä aivan lähellä

ovea. Kohotin salpaa ja työnsin sen kiinni samalla hetkellä, jolloin
ensimmäinen vartiosotilas heittäytyi ulkopuolelta sen paksuja
lankkuja vasten.

Ovi kesti — olin ennättänyt ajoissa, mutta en sekuntiakaan liian

aikaisin.

Nyt riensin auttamaan vankeja. Ensin kysyin Tardos Morsilta, missä

heidän kahleittensa avaimet olivat. "Ne ovat vartioston upseerin
hallussa", vastasi Heliumin jeddak, "ja hän on oven ulkopuolella
pyrkimässä sisään. Sinun on murrettava kahleet."

Useimmat vangit hakkasivat jo kahleitaan miekoilla. Keltaiset

sotilaat paukuttivat ovea keihäillä ja kirveillä. Kävin käsiksi Tardos
Morsin kahleihin. Painoin säiläni terän kerran toisensa jälkeen syvälle
metalliin, mutta yhä kiukkuisemmin sateli myöskin iskuja oveen.
Vihdoin katkesi rengas ja Tardos Mors oli seuraavalla hetkellä vapaa,
vaikkakin kahletta laahautui vielä muutamien sentimetrien pituudelta
hänen nilkastaan.

Ovesta sinkoutui sälö huoneeseen osoittaen, että vihollisemme

olivat murtautumaisillaan kimppuumme.

Vankat lankut vavahtelivat ja notkuivat vimmastuneiden

keltaihoisten raivoisista ponnistuksista.
 Ovelle satavat iskut ja kahleitaan katkovien punaisten miesten
hakkaaminen täytti huoneen huumaavalla melulla. Heti
vapauduttuaan Tardos Mors ryhtyi auttamaan erästä toista punaista
vankia, ja minä kiiruhdin vapauttamaan Mors Kajakia.

Meidän oli toimittava ripeästi, jos mielimme saada kaikki kahleet

poikki, ennenkuin ovi antaisi perään. Jo pudota räiskähti yksi lankku
sisälle, ja Mors Kajak syöksyi aukolle puolustamaan sitä, kunnes me
saisimme muiden vankien kahleet rikotuiksi.

Seiniltä sieppaamillaan heittokeihäillä hän teki tuhoisaa jälkeä

etumaisten okarilaisten riveissä, samalla kun me ponnistelimme
elotonta metallia vastaan, joka erotti toverimme vapaudesta.

Vihdoin, kun vangeista kaikki muut paitsi yksi oli saatu irti, ovi
kovasti rysähtäen murtui kiireesti kyhätyn muurinsärkijän
sysäyksestä, ja keltaihoinen lauma tulvahti kimppuumme.

"Ylähuoneisiin!" kiljaisi vielä kahleissa oleva punainen mies.

"Ylähuoneisiin! Siellä voitte puolustaa tornia koko Kadabraa vastaan.
Älkää minun tähteni vitkastelko! En toivo mitään parempaa kuin
kuolla
palvellessani Tardos Morsia ja Heliumin prinssiä."

Mutta mieluummin olisin pannut alttiiksi kaikkien hengen kuin

jättänyt yhtäkään punaista miestä pulaan, eritoten tällaista
leijonasydämistä sankaria, joka rukoili meitä lähtemään ja
hylkäämään hänet.

"Katkaiskaa hänen kahleensa!" huusin kahdelle punaiselle. "Sillä

aikaa me muut pidätämme vihollisia."
 Meitä oli nyt kymmenen ottelemaan okarilaista vartiostoa vastaan,
ja voinpa taata, ettei vanha vahtitorni, jonka jylhien muurien sisällä
taistelimme, ole koskaan nähnyt tuimempaa taistelua.

Keltaisten sotilaiden ensimmäinen hyökkäysaalto murtui

kymmenen heliumilaisen sotilasveteraanin säihkyviin säiliin. Tusina
okarilaisia virui oviaukolla, mutta tämän kaamean esteen yli syöksyi
huoneeseen parikymmentä uutta keltaista kajahduttaen kumean ja
pelottavan sotahuutonsa.

Verisen vallituksen äärellä olimme kylki kyljessä heitä

vastaanottamassa survoen miekoillamme, kun tila oli liian ahdas
sivalluksien antamiseen, ja antaen piston, milloin vain vihollinen oli
käsivartemme ulottuvissa. Ja okarilaisten hurjan huudon seasta
kohosivat mainehikkaat sanat: "Heliumin puolesta! Heliumin
puolesta!" Lukemattomien miespolvien aikana ne ovat kannustaneet
urhoollisista urhoollisimpia niihin loistaviin tekoihin, joiden johdosta
Heliumin sankarien maine on levinnyt ympäri koko Barsoomin.

Pian olivat viimeisenkin punaisen vangin kahleet poikki, ja

kolmentoista miehen voimalla torjuimme Salensus Ollin sotilaiden
uudistuneet hyökkäykset. Melkein jokaisesta meistä vuoti verta
paristakymmenestä haavasta, mutta ainoatakaan ei ollut kaatunut.

Näimme vartiosotilaita rientävän pihalle sadoittain, ja

alakäytävästä, jota myöten olin tullut asehuoneeseen, kuului
metallivarustusten kalinaa ja miesten huutoja.

Hetkisen kuluttua olisimme kahden tulen välissä emmekä

taistelukunnostamme huolimatta voisi toivoakaan pitävämme
puoliamme niin rusentavaa ylivoimaa vastaan, kun pienen
joukkomme olisi torjuttava vihollisia kahdelta puolen.
 "Ylähuoneisiin!" komensi Tardos Mors, ja seuraavalla hetkellä
kiiruhdimme ylempiin kerroksiin vieville kiertoportaille.

Siinä ottelimme taaskin verisesti keltaisten miesten kanssa, jotka

syöksyivät asehuoneeseen, kun me peräydyimme ovelta. Siellä
kaatui meistä ensimmäinen, uljas toveri, jonka menetys oli meille
ankara isku. Mutta vihdoin olivat kaikki muut paitsi minä vetäytyneet
kiertoportaille. Minä jäin torjumaan okarilaisia, kunnes toiset olisivat
turvassa ylhäällä.

Portaiden ahtaalla suulla voi kimppuuni hyökätä vain yksi mies

kerrallaan, joten minun ei ollut kovinkaan vaikeata pidättää koko
joukkoa sitä vähäistä aikaa, joka tarvittiin. Sitten aloin itsekin hitaasti
vetäytyä kiertoportaita ylöspäin.

Vartiosotilaat ahdistivat minua tuimasti koko ajan noustessamme

tornin huipulle vieviä pitkiä portaita. Kun yksi kaatui saatuaan iskun
säilästäni, kiipesi heti toinen ruumiin yli hänen tilalleen. Jaellen siten
surmaa melkein joka askelella pääsin vihdoin Kadabran tilavaan
lasiseinäiseen vahtitorniin.

Siellä olivat toverini yhtenä miehenä valmiit käymään tilalleni, ja

levähtääkseni hetkisen astuin syrjään heidän torjuessaan vihollisia.

Korkealta paikaltamme meillä oli penikulmia laaja näköala joka

suuntaan. Etelässä päin ulottui rosoinen, jääpeittoinen aavikko
valtavan muurin reunaan saakka. Idästä ja lännestä ja hämärästi
myöskin pohjoisesta erotin okarilaisten muita kaupunkeja, ja
etualalla, aivan Kadabran muurien kupeella, kohosi kaamean
turvatornin synkkä huippu.
 Sitten loin katseeni Kadabran kaduille, joilta alkoi äkkiä kuulua
melua. Näin, että siellä raivosi taistelu ja että kaupungin muurien
ulkopuolella marssi suuria sotilasosastoja läheistä porttia kohti.

Painauduin kiihkeästi tähystyspaikkani lasiseinää vasten, tuskin

uskaltaen uskoa omia silmiäni. Mutta vihdoin oli minun mahdotonta
epäillä ja päästäen riemuhuudon, joka kuului oudolta huoneen ovella
taistelevien miesten sadatusten ja valitusten keskellä, kutsuin Tardos
Morsia luokseni.

Hänen tultuaan vierelleni osoitin Kadabran katuja ja lähestyviä

sotilasosastoja, joiden yläpuolella Heliumin värit liehuivat uljaasti
napaseudun ilmassa.

Hetkistä myöhemmin oli jokainen vartiotornissa oleva punainen

mies nähnyt tämän innostavan näyn, ja he kohottivat niin
voimakkaan riemuisan, kiitollisen kiljunnan, ettei sellainen varmasti
ole ennen koskaan vapisuttanut tämän ikivanhan tornin seiniä.

Mutta meidän oli yhä jatkettava taistelua, sillä vaikkakin

sotajoukkomme oli saapunut Kadabraan, niin kaupunki ei suinkaan
ollut vielä antautunut eikä palatsia vastaan oltu tehty edes
ainoatakaan hyökkäystä. Vuorotellen puolustimme portaiden
yläpäätä toisten riemuiten katsellessa, kuinka urheat
maanmiehemme taistelivat alhaalla.

Nyt he hyökkäävät palatsin porttia vastaan! Jykevillä

muurinmurtajilla he iskevät sen vankkoja lankkuja. Nyt heidän on
pakko peräytyä muurin harjalta lähetetyn murhaavan keihässateen
tieltä!
 Uudelleen he syöksyvät porttia kohti, mutta syrjäkadulta hyökkää
voimakas okarilaisosasto ja murskaa heidän eturivinsä. Heliumin
miehet kaatuvat taistellessaan ylivoimaa vastaan.

Palatsin portti lennähtää auki, ja osasto jeddakin henkivartiostoa,

Okarin armeijan parhaistosta valittuja miehiä, rientää tuhoamaan
heliumilaisten murtuneita rivejä. Hetkisen näyttää tappio varmalta,
mutta sitten kiintyy katseeni uljaaseen mieheen, joka ratsastaa
valtavan kookkaalla thoatilla — ei punaisen kansan pienellä thoatilla,
vaan sen jättiläiskokoisella, kuivuneiden merien pohjilla asustavalla
serkulla.

Sotilas raivaa itselleen tien eturiveihin, ja Heliumin hajalleen

joutuneet sotilaat järjestyvät uudelleen hänen takanaan. Kun hän
kohottaa päätään sinkauttaakseen uhmaavan sanan palatsin
muureilla oleville miehille, näen hänen kasvonsa, ja rintani paisuu
ylpeydestä ja riemusta, kun punaiset sotilaat kiiruhtavat johtajansa
rinnalle ja valtaavat takaisin juuri menettämänsä asemat. Kookkaalla
thoatilla ratsastava mies on poikani, Heliumin Carthoris.

Hänen rinnallaan tappelee iso marsilainen sotakoira, eikä tarvinnut

vilkaista toista kertaa tietääkseni, että se oli Woola — uskollinen
Woolani, joka oli suorittanut vaikean tehtävänsä ja tuonut tänne
apuvoimat juuri parhaaseen aikaan.

Parhaaseen aikaan?

Kukapa olisi vielä voinut sanoa, etteivät ne olleet joutuneet liian

myöhään meitä pelastamaan! Mutta kostamaan ne varmasti ehtivät!
Ja kuinka ankarasti tuo voittamaton armeija rankaisisikaan vihattuja
okarilaisia! Huokasin ajatellessani, etten kenties olisi elossa sitä
näkemässä.
 Käännyin jälleen katsomaan. Punaiset joukot eivät olleet vielä
päässeet palatsin ulkomuurille, mutta ne taistelivat rohkeasti Okarin
parhaita sotilaita vastaan, jotka uljaasti puolustivat jokaista tuumaa
tiestä.

Huomioni kiintyi uusiin, kaupungin muurin ulkopuolelle

ilmestyneihin tulokkaihin — suureen ryhmään ratsastajia, jotka olivat
verrattomasti kookkaampia kuin punaiset miehet. Ne olivat Heliumin
isoja vihreitä liittolaisia, kaukaisen etelän kuivuneiden merenpohjien
hurjia asukkaita.

Jylhän äänettömyyden vallitessa he kiitivät porttia kohti, eikä

kauhua herättävien ratsujen pehmeistä kavioista kuulunut
vähääkään kapsetta. He syöksyivät tuhoon tuomittuun kaupunkiin, ja
kun he kaarsivat jeddakien jeddakin palatsin edustalla olevalle
avaralle aukiolle, näin heidän etunenässään ratsastavan
kookasvartaloisen johtajan — Tharkin jeddakin Tars Tarkasin.

Toiveeni niin ollen täyttyisi, sillä saisin vielä kerran nähdä vanhan
ystäväni taistelevan. Ja myöskin minä taistelisin, vaikkakaan en olka
olassa hänen kanssaan, saman asian puolesta täällä Okarin
korkeassa tornissa.

Eivätkä vihollisemme näyttäneet herkeävän itsepintaisesti

hyökkäämästä, sillä heitä tuli yhä, vaikka huoneeseemme tuova tie
oli usein tukossa heidän kaatuneittensa ruumiista. Silloin tällöin he
pysähtyivät siksi aikaa, että ehtivät raahata pois tielleen
kasaantuneet ruumiit, ja sitten taas riensi uusia sotilaita ylöspäin
maistamaan kuoleman pikarista.

Olin parhaillaan vuorostani puolustamassa turvapaikkamme ovea,

kun Mors Kajakilta, joka oli tarkkaillut kadulla riehuvaa taistelua,
äkkiä pääsi kiihkeä huudahdus. Hänen äänessään oli huolestunut
sointu, minkä vuoksi kiiruhdin hänen luokseen heti, kun sain
luovutetuksi paikkani toiselle. Hän osoitti lumi- ja jääaavikon ylitse
eteläistä taivaanrantaa.

"Voi!" hän valitti. "Miksi pitää minun nähdä julman kohtalon

pettävän heidät kykenemättä varoittamaan tai auttamaan heitä!
Mutta nyt olisikin jo myöhäistä!" Katsoin hänen osoittamaansa
suuntaan ja oivalsin hänen levottomuutensa syyn. Valtava
lentolaivue lähestyi Kadabraa jäämuurilta päin. Se saapui yhä
lähemmäksi ja vauhti kävi yhä nopeammaksi.

"Kamala torni, jota keltaiset nimittävät Pohjolan Vartijaksi, vetää

laivoja puoleensa", virkkoi Mors Kajak murheellisesti, "samoin kuin
se veti Tardos Morsin suuren laivaston. Katsos tuonne! Siellä ovat
kaikki aluksemme särkyneinä hylkyinä hirvittävän kaameana
todistuksena kauhistuttavasta, tuhoavasta voimasta, jota ei mikään
voi vastustaa."

Myöskin minä näin. Mutta näin muutakin, mitä Mors Kajak ei

nähnyt. Sieluni silmiin kuvastui maanalainen kammio, jonka seinillä
oli kummallisia koneita.

Kammion lattian keskellä oli pitkä pöytä, jonka ääressä istui pieni,
mulkosilmäinen vanhus laskien rahojaan. Mutta kaikkein selvimmin
näin seinään kiinnitetyn ison vivun, jonka kädensijan mustaan
pintaan oli upotettu pieni magneetti.

Vilkaisin uudelleen nopeasti kiitävää laivastoa. Viidessä minuutissa

tuo suuri ilma-armeija olisi arvottomaksi romuksi pirstoutuneena
tornin juurella kaupungin muurin vierellä, ja keltaisia laumoja
rientäisi portista harvojen, hylkyläjällä tyrmistyneinä kompuroivien
henkiinjääneiden lentäjien kimppuun. Sitten saapuisivat aptit. Minua
puistatti sitä ajatellessani, sillä koko kaamea näky väikkyi elävästi
mielessäni.

Päätökseni ja toimintani ovat aina olleet ripeitä. Liikkeellepaneva

vaikutin ja teon suorittaminen näyttävät olevan minussa
samanaikaisia, sillä jos sielunelämässäni tapahtuu ikävä, muodollinen
järkeily, niin sen kaiken täytyy käydä alitajunnassani, jota silloin en
itse huomaa. Sielutieteen kannalta alitajunnalla ei ole järkeä, joten,
jos sielunelämääni tutkittaisiin perinpohjin, tulos ei suinkaan olisi
minua imarteleva. Olkoon sen laita kuinka hyvänsä, joka tapauksessa
olen usein onnistunut sellaisessa tilanteessa, jossa ajattelija olisi
jäänyt loppumattomasti punnitsemaan ja vertailemaan vastakkaisia
järkisyitä.

Ja nyt oli nopea toiminta päättämäni teon menestymisen ensi

ehto.

Puristin miekkaani lujemmin ja käskin kiertoportaiden aukolla

olevan punaisen miehen väistyä syrjään.

"Tietä Heliumin prinssille!" kiljaisin, ja ennenkuin hämmästynyt

keltainen sotilas, joka onnettomuudekseen sattui juuri sillä hetkellä
olemaan etumaisena hyökkäysjonossa, ehätti tointua ällistyksestään,
oli miekkani halkaissut hänen kallonsa, ja minä karkasin kuin
raivostunut härkä hänen takanaan olevien miesten kimppuun.

"Tietä Heliumin prinssille!" huusin raivatessani itselleni uraa

Salensus Ollin typertyneiden henkivartijoiden keskitse.

Sivallellen iskuja oikealle ja vasemmalle tunkeuduin kiertoportaita

myöten, jotka olivat ahdettuina täyteen sotilaita. Päästyäni lähelle
alapäätä luulivat alempana olevat, että kokonainen armeija oli
hyökkäämässä portaita alas, ja lähtivät pakoon.

Ensimmäisessä kerroksessa oleva asevarasto oli tyhjä sinne

saapuessani, sillä siellä olleet okarilaiset olivat paenneet pihalle,
joten kukaan ei nähnyt minun jatkavan matkaani edelleen
kiertoportaita myöten alaspäin maanalaista käytävää kohti.

Sinne päästyäni juoksin minkä käpälistä pääsin viiden tunnelin

risteykselle ja sieltä edelleen pitkin vanhan saiturin vartiopaikalle
vievää käytävää.

Jätin syrjään kohteliaisuudet ja syöksähdin naputtamatta

huoneeseen. Vanhus istui pöydän ääressä, mutta heti minut
nähtyään hän hyppäsi pystyyn ja vetäisi miekkansa esiin.

Hädin tuskin vilkaistuani häneen harppasin isolle vivulle, mutta

vaikka liikuinkin nopeasti, niin jäntevän sitkeä vanhus oli siellä ennen
minua.

Minulla ei ole aavistusta, kuinka se kävi, ja mahdottomalta tuntuu,

että yksikään Marsissa syntynyt olento voisi liikkua läheskään niin
ripeästi kuin minä Maassa kehittyneine lihaksineni.

Hän karkasi minua vastaan rajusti kuin tiikeri, ja pian oivalsin,

minkä tähden Solan oli valittu tämän tärkeän toimeni hoitajaksi.

En eläissäni ole tavannut niin erinomaista ja niin ihmeellisen

nopealiikkeistä miekkailijaa kuin tämä vanha luusäkki oli. Hän oli
samalla kertaa senkin seitsemässä paikassa, ja ennenkuin
älysinkään, kuinka vaarallinen vastustajani oli, hän oli vähällä
toimittaa minut tuonelaan.
 On kummallista, kuinka ihmisen jouduttua odottamattaan uusiin
oloihin hänessä herää ennen aavistamattomia kykyjä, joiden avulla
hän voi niistä selviytyä.

Sinä päivänä sain Salensus Ollin palatsin maanalaisessa

kammiossa oppia tietämään, mitä miekkailutaito merkitsee ja
minkälaisia ennätyksiä kykenin siinä saavuttamaan, kun vastustajani
oli sellainen taituri kuin Solan.

Jonkun aikaa hän näytti olevan voiton puolella, mutta piilevät

kykyni, joiden on täytynyt koko ikäni olla minussa uinuvina, tulivat
pian näkyviin, ja taistelin niin, etten ollut uneksinutkaan
ihmisolennon voivan sillä tavoin miekkailla.

Se, että tämä loistava kaksintaistelu tapahtui himmeässä

kellariholvissa ilman ainoatakaan asiantuntevaa näkijää, on minusta
aina tuntunut melkein koko maailmaa kohdanneelta vahingolta —
ainakin barsoomilaisten näkökannalta katsoen, sillä siellä sekä yksilöt
että kansat ja rodut pitävät verileikkiä kaikkein tärkeimpänä asiana.

Minä koetin otellessamme päästä käsiksi vipuun, Solan estää

minua siitä, ja vaikkakin olimme vajaan metrin päässä siitä, niin
ensimmäisten viiden minuutin kuluessa en voinut lyhentää
välimatkaa sentimetrilläkään eikä hän liioin pakottaa minua
vähääkään takaisinpäin.

Tiesin, että jos minun oli mieli kääntää se ajoissa pelastaakseni

lähenevän laivaston, minun oli se tehtävä lähimpinä sekunteina, ja
senvuoksi turvauduin vanhaan syöksytaktiikkaani. Mutta Solan kesti
kaiken syöksyni horjumattomana kuin muuri.
 Olin itse asiassa ponnistellessani vähällä syöstä itseni hänen
miekkansa kärkeen. Mutta oikeus oli minun puolellani ja luulen, että
se tekee toiminnan varmemmaksi kuin muutoin, jos tietäisi
taistelevansa väärän ja huonon asian puolesta.

Minulta ei ainakaan puuttunut luottamusta, ja kun uudelleen tein

hyökkäyksen, tällä kertaa tähdäten pistoni Solan kupeeseen, olin
varma, että hänen oli pakko kääntyä torjuakseen uudelta taholta
uhkaavat iskuni. Ja hän kääntyikin, joten nyt miekkailimme kyllin
haluamaani päämäärää kohti — iso vipu oli oikealla puolellani käteni
ulottuvissa.

Rintani paljastaminen hetkiseksikään oli pikaisen kuoleman

uhittelemista, mutta minulla ei ollut muuta keinoa kuin uskaltaa se.
Sillä siten kenties saisin nopeasti kiitävän apulaivaston pelastetuksi.
Ja niinpä minä huolimatta uhkaavasta miekan pistosta annoin säiläni
kärjellä äkkiä piston vanhalle vivulle, niin että se heilahti pois
paikaltaan.

Solan hämmästyi ja säikähti niin, ettei hän täydentänyt pistoaan.

Sensijaan hän pyörähti vipua kohti päästäen äänekkään parkaisun —
viimeisensä, sillä ennenkuin hänen ojennettu kätensä kosketti vipua,
oli miekkani kärki lävistänyt hänen sydämensä.
NELJÄSTOISTA LUKU

Ratkaisu

Mutta Solanin viimeinen äänekäs huudahdus ei ollut tehoton, sillä

hetkisen kuluttua syöksähti huoneeseen kymmenkunta
vartiosotilasta. Tällä välin olin kuitenkin jo ennättänyt vääntää ja
rikkoa ison vivun niin, ettei sillä voitu uudelleen ohjata voimakasta
virtaa valtavaan tuhoisaan magneettitorniin.

Kun vartiosotilaat äkkiä saapuivat huoneeseen, oli minun pakko

koettaa piiloutua ensimmäiseen tielleni osuvaan käytävään. Se ei
harmikseni sattunut olemaan sama, jonka jo ennestään tunsin, vaan
eräs toinen, edellisestä vasemmalle.

Viholliseni olivat varmaankin joko kuulleet tai arvanneet, minne

päin olin lähtenyt, sillä ehdittyäni vain vähän matkaa kuului
takaapäin perästäni tulevia ääniä. En ollenkaan halunnut pysähtyä
taistelemaan näiden miesten kanssa, sillä tällä hetkellä saisin
Kadabran kaupungissa otella yllin kyllin, ja toisaalla saattaisi
taistelustani olla itselleni ja asialleni paljoa enemmän hyötyä kuin
tarpeettomasta surmaamisesta syvällä palatsin alla.
 Mutta takaa-ajajat olivat kintereilläni, ja kun en ensinkään
tuntenut tietä, niin minulle pian selvisi, että he saavuttaisivat minut,
jollen onnistuisi pujahtamaan johonkin piiloon, kunnes he olisivat
menneet ohitseni. Senjälkeen voisin sitten joko palata samaa tietä
takaisin torniin tai pääsisin mahdollisesti jollakin tavoin kaupungille.

Vipukammiosta alkaen käytävä oli kohonnut tuntuvasti, mutta se

jatkui tasaisena ja valoisana mutkittelematta silmänkantamiin. Heti
kun takaa-ajajani saapuisivat tälle suoralle kohdalle, näkisivät he
minut selvästi ja minun olisi mahdotonta huomaamatta livahtaa
käytävästä.

Jonkun matkan päässä oli käytävän kahden puolen useita ovia, ja

kun ne olivat minusta kaikki samanlaisia, pujahdin sisään
ensimmäisestä. Ovi avautui pieneen loistavasti kalustettuun
kamariin, joka ilmeisesti oli jonkun viraston odotushuone tai palatsin
vastaanottohuone.

Vastaisella seinällä oli raskaiden verhojen peittämä ovi, jonka

takaa kuului puheen sorinaa. Menin heti lattian poikki, raotin verhoja
ja tähystin avarampaan huoneeseen.

Siellä oli viitisenkymmentä upeasti puettua hoviylimystä käsittävä

seurue, seisoen valtaistuimen edessä, jolla istui Salensus Oll.
Jeddakien jeddak puhui parhaillaan.

"Määrähetki on käsissä", hän selitti juuri saapuessani, "ja vaikkakin

Okarin viholliset ovat kaupungin porttien sisällä, niin mikään ei saa
estää Salensus Ollin tahtoa täyttymästä. Suurista juhlamenoista on
meidän pakko luopua, ettei ainoankaan miehen tarvitsisi poistua
paikaltaan suojavarustuksilta, lukuun ottamatta niitä viittäkymmentä,
joiden on vanhan tavan mukaan oltava todistamassa, kun Okarille
nimitetään uusi kuningatar.

"— Koko toimitus suoritetaan lyhyessä tuokiossa, ja sitten

palaamme taisteluun, nykyisen Heliumin prinsessan jäädessä
kuningattaren torniin katselemaan entisten maanmiestensä tuhoa ja
puolisonsa mahtia."

Sitten hän kääntyi erään hovimiehen puoleen ja lausui tälle hiljaa

jonkun määräyksen.

Tämä riensi huoneen toisessa päässä olevalle pienelle ovelle,

aukaisi sen selko selälleen ja huudahti: "Tietä Dejah Thorisille,
Okarin tulevalle kuningattarelle!"

Samassa ilmestyi kaksi vartiosotilasta raahaten vastustelevaa

morsianta alttarille. Dejah Thorisin kädet olivat yhä selän taakse
sidottuina ilmeisesti itsemurhan estämiseksi.

Hänen pörröttynyt tukkansa ja läähättävä rintansa todistivat, että

hän oli kahlehdittunakin ponnistellut keltaisten aikomaa toimitusta
vastaan.

Nähdessään hänet Salensus Oll nousi seisomaan vetäisten

miekkansa paljaaksi. Samoin kaikki viisikymmentä ylimystä nostivat
miekkansa muodostaen kunniakaaren, jonka alitse ihanaa olento-
parkaa raahattiin tuomiolle.

Julma hymy väreili huulillani ajatellessani, kuinka kolkko

herääminen odotti Okarin hallitsijaa, ja hivelin verisen miekkani
kahvaa syyhyisin sormin.
 Katsellessani valtaistuinta kohti hitaasti etenevää kulkuetta, jossa
oli vain kourallinen Dejah Thorisin ja molempien vartiosotilaiden
jäljestä astelevia pappeja, näin ohimennen vilahdukselta mustan
naaman tirkistävän morsiantaan odottavan Salensus Ollin
valtaistuimen takaa, seinää peittävän verhon raosta.

Parhaillaan vartiosotilaat kiskoivat Heliumin prinsessaa Okarin

tyrannin vierelle vieviä porrasaskelmia ylöspäin, ja katseeni ja
ajatukseni olivat kiintyneet yksinomaan siihen. Yksi papeista aukaisi
kirjan, kohotti kätensä ja alkoi laulavasti lukea juhlallisen toimituksen
sanoja. Salensus Oll ojensi kätensä tarttuakseen morsiamen käteen.

Olin aikonut odottaa, kunnes tarjoutuisi sellainen tilaisuus, että

minulla olisi jonkun verran menestyksen toiveita, sillä vaikkakin koko
toimitus saataisiin suoritetuksi loppuun, niin avioliitto olisi sittenkin
mitätön, koska minä olin elossa. Tärkeintä oli minusta Dejah Thorisin
pelastaminen — tahdoin viedä hänet pois Salensus Ollin palatsista,
jos se suinkin kävisi päinsä. Toisarvoinen seikka oli, tapahtuisiko se
ennen tätä valevihkimistä vaiko sen jälkeen.

Mutta kun näin Salensus Ollin ojentavan kurjan kätensä rakkaan

prinsessani kättä kohti, en jaksanut enää hillitä itseäni, ja ennenkuin
Okarin ylimykset aavistivat mitään, olin ennättänyt heidän harvojen
riviensä välitse korokkeelle Dejah Thorisin ja Salensus Ollin vierelle.

Miekkani lappeella iskin syrjään jeddakin häpäisevän käden. Sitten

tartuin Dejah Thorisin vyötäisiin ja heilautin hänet taakseni sijoittuen
itse selin korokkeen verhoja vasten valmiina uhmaamaan pohjolan
tyrannia ja hänen ylimyssotilaitaan.

Jeddakien jeddak oli tavattoman iso, raaka ja häikäilemätön mies.

Kun hän seisoi edessäni, paljoa kookkaampana kuin minä, musta
parta ja viikset raivosta jäykkinä, niin voin hyvin ymmärtää, että
vähemmän karaistunut sotilas olisi saattanut vapista hänet
nähdessään.

Karjaisten hän karkasi miekka ojossa kimppuuni, mutta

mahdotonta on minun tietää, oliko Salensus Oli hyvä vaiko huono
miekkailija, sillä Dejah Thorisin ollessa selkäni takana en ollut enää
inhimillinen olento, olin yli-ihminen, eikä yksikään mies kyennyt
pitämään puoliaan minua vastaan.

Kuiskasin vain: "Heliumin prinsessan puolesta!" ja upotin miekkani

Okarin turmeltuneen hallitsijan saastaiseen sydämeen. Ylimysten
katsellessa kalpeina ja naamat pitkinä Salensus Oll kieri, kasvot
vääntyneinä kammottavaan irvistykseen, vihkimäkorokkeensa
portaiden juureen.

Hetkisen vallitsi häähuoneessa kuolon hiljaisuus. Sitten kaikki

viisikymmentä ylimystä hyökkäsivät minua vastaan. Syntyi tuima
taistelu, mutta minä olin paremmalla puolella seisoessani heidän
yläpuolellaan korokkeella, ja taistelin kauniin rodun kauneimman
naisen puolesta.

Ja takaani kajahti hopealta helkkyvän armaan äänen laulamana

Heliumin sotalaulu, jota Heliumin kansan naiset laulavat, kun heidän
miehensä marssivat voittoon.

Jo se yksin olisi riittänyt minut innostamaan voittoon, vaikkapa

vastassani olisi ollut vieläkin peloittavampi ylivoima, ja uskon
varmasti, että olisin silloin selviytynyt keltaisista sotilaista, vaikka
Kadabran palatsin häähuone olisi ollut heitä täpö täynnä. Mutta
odottamattani keskeytyi taistelu, kun sain apua.
 Taistelu oli raivoisan tulinen. Salensus Ollin ylimykset ryntäsivät
kerran toisensa jälkeen valtaistuimen edessä oleville portaille, mutta
aina he suistuivat takaisin, sillä heitä vastassa oli oikea käsi, joka
tuntui saaneen lisää taituruutta oltuaan tekemisissä Solan-mestarin
kanssa.

Kuului takaani liikettä ja sotalaulun sävelet vaikenivat, mutta juuri

silloin ahdisti pari okarilaista minua niin tuimasti, etten voinut
kääntyä katsomaan sinne päin. Aikoiko Dejah Thoris sijoittua
viereeni taistelemaan?

Sankarillisen taivaankappaleen sankaritytär! Olisi ollut hyvin hänen

olemuksensa mukaista, jos hän olisi tarttunut miekkaan ja asettunut
vierelleni, sillä vaikkakaan Marsin naisille ei opeteta sotaisia
temppuja, niin heidän henkensä on kuitenkin sotainen, ja
lukemattomia kertoja tiedän heidän olleen mukana verileikissä.

Mutta häntä ei kuulunut, ja iloissani siitä olinkin, sillä minun olisi

ollut varottava kahta vertaa huolekkaammin suojatakseni häntäkin,
ennenkuin olisin saanut hänet pakotetuksi takaisin turvalliseen
paikkaan. Hän varmaankin mietti jotakin ovelaa juonta, arvelin, ja
ottelin edelleen siinä varmassa uskossa, että jumalainen prinsessani
oli selkäni takana.

Olin taistellut Okarin ylimyksiä vastaan ainakin puoli tuntia, eikä

ainoakaan heistä ollut saanut jalansijaa korokkeella, jolla minä olin.
Sitten kaikki hengissä olevat vastustajani järjestäytyivät äkkiä
viimeistä, hurjaa, epätoivoista hyökkäystä varten. Mutta kun he juuri
valmistautuivat karkaamaan kimppuuni, lennähti huoneen toisessa
päässä oleva ovi auki ja siitä syöksähti sisään kiihtyneen ja
hurjistuneen näköinen lähetti.
 "Jeddakien jeddak!" hän huohotti. "Missä on jeddakien jeddak?
Kaupunki on kukistunut, jäämuurin takaiset laumat ovat sen
vallanneet. Ja juuri äsken sortui myöskin itse palatsin portti, ja
etelän sotilaita tulvii palatsin pyhälle alueelle.

"— Missä on Salensus Oll? Vain hän saattaa uudelleen rohkaista

horjuvia sotilaitamme. Vain hän voi nyt pelastaa Okarin tuholta.
Missä on Salensus Oll?"

Ylimykset vetäytyivät kauemmaksi hallitsijansa ruumiin ympäriltä,

ja yksi heistä osoitti hänen vääristyneitä kasvojaan.

Lähetti hoippui kauhistuneena taaksepäin ikäänkuin hän olisi

saanut iskun vasten kasvojaan.

"Paetkaa sitten, Okarin ylimykset!" hän kiljaisi. "Mikään ei voi teitä

pelastaa. Kuulkaa! He tulevat!"

Käytävästä kuului kumeita kiukkuisia huutoja, metallivarustusten

kalahtelua ja miekkojen kalsketta.

Vilkaisemattakaan enää minuun, joka olin ollut tämän murheellisen

kohtauksen näkijänä, ylimykset pyörsivät ympäri ja pakenivat
huoneesta toisesta ovesta. Melkein samalla hetkellä ilmestyi joukko
keltaisia sotilaita sille ovelle, josta lähetti oli tullut. He peräytyivät
huonetta kohti jäykästi puolustautuen. Heitä ahdisti kourallinen
punaisia sotilaita, jotka hitaasti, mutta varmasti pakottivat heitä
takaisin päin.

Korkealta paikaltani näin ottelevien ylitse vanhan ystäväni Kantos

Kanin kasvot. Hän johti tätä pientä joukkuetta, joka oli tunkeutunut
Salensus Ollin palatsin sydämeen.
 Heti oivalsin, että hyökkäämällä okarilaisten kimppuun selästä päin
saattaisin heidät perin pohjin epäjärjestykseen, joten heidän
vastarintansa olisi pian lopussa. Tämän ajatuksen vallassa hyppäsin
alas korokkeelta, selittäen Dejah Thorisille aikomukseni parilla olan
yli lausutulla sanalla kääntymättä häntä katsomaan.

Kun olin yhä hänen ja vihollisten välissä Kantos Kanin sotilaineen

tunkeutuessa huoneeseen, ei Dejah Thorisia voinut mikään vaara
uhata, vaikka hän jäikin yksin valtaistuimen luokse.

Tahdoin näyttää heliumilaisille itseni ja ilmoittaa heille, että heidän

rakastettu prinsessansa oli myöskin täällä, sillä olin varma, että se
tieto kannustaisi heitä vieläkin uljaampiin sankaritekoihin kuin mitä
he olivat jo suorittaneet, vaikka heidän oli totisesti täytynyt tehdä
suuria urotöitä raivatessaan tiensä pohjolan tyrannin melkein
valloittamattomaan palatsiin.

Juostessani lattian poikki hyökätäkseni kadabralaisten niskaan,

avautui vasemmalla puolellani pieni ovi, ja hämmästyksekseni näin
thernien isän Matai Shangin ja hänen tyttärensä Phaidorin pilkistävän
siitä sisään.

He vilkaisivat nopeasti huoneeseen. Hetkisen he tuijottivat

kauhuissaan Salensus Ollin elottomaan ruumiiseen, veren
punaamaan lattiaan, valtaistuimen edustalle kasoittain kaatuneihin
ylimyksiin, minuun ja ovella taisteleviin sotilaihin.

He eivät aikoneetkaan astua sisään, silmäilivät vain ovella seisoen

joka puolelle huonetta. Kun he sitten olivat tarkastaneet koko lattian,
levisi Matai Shangin kasvoille hurja, raivoisa ilme ja Phaidorin huulilla
väreili kylmä, ovela hymy.
 Sitten he katosivat, mutta sitä ennen päästi nainen raikuvan
pilkkanaurun minulle vasten kasvoja.

En silloin ymmärtänyt, mistä Matai Shangin raivo johtui ja mitä

Phaidorin riemu merkitsi, mutta siitä olin varma, että ne kumpikin
olivat minulle pahoja enteitä.

Hetkistä myöhemmin olin keltaisten sotilaiden kimpussa, ja kun

Heliumin punaiset miehet näkivät minut vastustajiensa olkapäiden
ylitse, kajahti käytävässä voimakas huuto, johon taistelun melu
vähäksi aikaa hukkui.

"Heliumin prinssin puolesta!" he huusivat. "Heliumin prinssin

puolesta!" Ja kuin nälkäiset leijonat saaliinsa kimppuun he
hyökkäsivät pohjolan sotilaiden horjuvia rivejä vastaan.

Kahden tulen väliin joutuneet keltaiset sotilaat taistelivat

epätoivoisen rohkeasti, kuten äärimmäisen toivottomaan asemaan
joutuneet useinkin tekevät ja kuten minäkin olisin tehnyt, jos olisin
ollut heidän sijassaan, koettaen viedä mukanani tuonelaan vihollisia
niin paljon kuin suinkin voin.

Ottelu oli loistava, mutta tulos näytti etukäteen varmalta. Mutta

äkkiä ilmestyi käytävän alapäästä punaisten miesten taakse suuri
joukko keltaisia sotilaita tovereittensa avuksi.

Nyt olivat osat vaihtuneet, ja heliumilaiset vuorostaan joutuneet

ahtaalle kahtaalta uhkaavien vihollisten väliseen puristukseen.
Heidän oli kaikkien pakko kääntyä puolustautumaan rusentavan
ylivoimaisia tulokkaita vastaan, joten valtaistuinhuoneessa olevat
ökarilaisten tähteet jäivät minun osalleni.
 Ja he pitivätkin minut lämpimänä. Jouduin niin tiukalle, että tuskin
enää toivoin heistä selviytyväni. He pakottivat minut hitaasti
peräytymään huoneeseen, ja kun kaikki olivat tulleet ovesta sisälle,
niin eräs heistä sulki sen laskien salvan eteen, joten se varmasti
katkaisi tien Kantos Kanin johtamilta punaisilta miehiltä.

Se oli taitava temppu, sillä siten jouduin minä yksin ottelemaan

toistakymmentä vihollista vastaan huoneessa, johon kukaan ei
päässyt minua auttamaan, eikä käytävässä oleville punaisille miehille
jäänyt pakenemistietä, jos heidän uudet vastustajansa panisivat
heidät liian lujille.

Mutta minun vastassani on ollut ylivoimaisempiakin vihollisia kuin

tällä kertaa, ja Kantos Kanin tiesin ase kädessä raivanneen itselleen
tien vaarallisemmistakin satimista kuin missä hän nyt oli. En niin
ollen ollut vähääkään epätoivoinen ryhtyessäni silloin leikkiin.

Ajatukseni pyörivät yhäti Dejah Thorisin ympärillä, ja odotin

kaivaten ottelun päättymistä ja hetkeä, jolloin saisin sulkea hänet
syliini ja taaskin kuulla rakkautta uhkuvia sanoja, joita olin saanut
niin monta vuotta kaivata.

Niin kauan kun taistelua huoneessa jatkui, ei minulla ollut

kertaakaan tilaisuutta edes vaivihkaa vilkaista taakseni kaatuneen
hallitsijan valtaistuimelle, jonka vierellä Dejah Thoris oli. Ihmettelin,
minkä vuoksi hän ei enää kiihoittanut minua laulamalla Heliumin
sotalaulua. Mutta enhän tarvinnutkaan muuta kuin tietää, että
taistelin hänen puolestaan, pannakseni parhaani.

Verisen ottelun yksityiskohtainen kuvaileminen kävisi

pitkäveteiseksi. Siirryimme ovelta huoneen poikki koko ajan taistellen
valtaistuimen juurelle, ennenkuin viimeinen vastustajani vaipui
lattialle säiläni lävistettyä hänen sydämensä.

Riemusta huudahtaen käännyin sitten ympäri painaakseni

prinsessani avoimeen syliini, odottaen kaipaamaani suudelmaa
kolminkertaiseksi palkkioksi niistä verisistä otteluista, jotka olin
saanut kestää rientäessäni hänen tähtensä etelänavalta
pohjoisnavalle.

Iloinen huudahdus kuoli huulilleni, käsivarteni retkahtivat

hervottomina sivuilleni, ja kuten surmaniskun saanut hoipuin
valtaistuimelle vieviä portaita ylöspäin.

Dejah Thoris oli kadonnut.

VIIDESTOISTA LUKU

Palkinto

Kun minulle selvisi, että Dejah Thoris ei enää ollut

valtaistuinsalissa, tulin vihdoinkin ajatelleeksi mustaa naamaa, jonka
olin vilahdukselta nähnyt tirkistävän Salensus Ollin valtaistuimen
takana olevien verhojen raosta samalla hetkellä, jolloin niin
odottamatta saavuin huoneessa tapahtuvien kummallisten menojen
näkijäksi.

Kuinka olinkaan voinut olla niin varomaton, vaikka olin nähnyt nuo
ilkeät kasvot? Kuinka olinkaan voinut sallia nopeasti vaihtuvan
tilanteen haihduttaa niin uhkaavan vaaran mielestäni? Mutta voi!
Turha valittelu ei voisi poistaa kohdannutta onnettomuutta.

Vielä kerran oli Dejah Thoris joutunut tuon pääilkimyksen,

ensisyntyisten datorin Thuridin, kynsiin. Taaskin oli koko vaivaloinen
puuhani rauennut tyhjiin. Nyt ymmärsin syyn siihen raivoon, joka oli
niin selvästi kuvastunut Matai Shangin kasvoilta, ja riemuun, joka oli
väikkynyt Phaidorin piirteillä.
 He olivat tietäneet tai arvanneet, kuinka asian laita oli, ja pyhien
thernien hekkador, joka oli tullut tänne tekemään tyhjäksi Salensus
Ollin suunnittelemat petolliset aikomukset — sillä ylipappi pyrki
saamaan Dejah Thorisin itselleen — oivalsi, että Thurid oli napannut
saaliin aivan hänen nenänsä edestä.

Phaidorin iloisuus taas johtui siitä, että hän tiesi, kuinka kipeästi
tämä viimeinen karvas isku koskisi minuun, ja että hänen
mustasukkainen vihansa Heliumin prinsessaa kohtaan oli tullut
osittain tyydytetyksi.

Ensimmäinen ajatukseni oli tarkastaa valtaistuimen takana olevia

verhoja, sillä niiden takaa olin Thuridin nähnyt. Yhdellä tempauksella
repäisin kallisarvoisen kankaan kiinnikkeistään. Edessäni oli seinässä
kapea ovi.

Minusta oli heti ilmeistä, että Thurid oli paennut juuri sitä tietä, ja
jos olisinkin sitä epäillyt, niin epäilykseni olisivat haihtuneet, kun näin
pienen jalokivikoristeen, joka oli muutamien askelien päässä ovelta
käytävän lattialla.

Sieppasin helyn ja tarkastin sitä; siinä oli Heliumin prinsessan

merkki. Painoin sen huulilleni ja lähdin kiitämään hurjasti kuin
mielipuoli pitkin kiemurtelevaa käytävää, joka laskeutui loivasti
palatsin alempia holveja kohti.

Lyhyen matkan juostuani jouduin siihen huoneeseen, jossa Solan

oli aikaisemmin hallinnut. Hänen ruumiinsa virui vielä samassa
paikassa kuin sieltä lähtiessäni, eikä näkynyt minkäänlaisia merkkejä
siitä, että siellä olisi joku toinen käynyt senjälkeen. Mutta tiesin
kahden henkilön, Thuridin, mustan datorin, ja Dejah Thorisin,
menneen tätä kautta.
 Hetkiseksi pysähdyin epävarmana aprikoimaan, mikä huoneeseen
avautuvista lukuisista ovista veisi minut oikealle tielle. Koetin
muistella niitä ohjeita, jotka Thurid oli kuulteni toistanut Solanille, ja
hitaasti kuin sakeasta sumusta ensisyntyisen sanat vihdoin kohosivat
muistiini.

"Menen käytävään, jota myöten sivuutan kolme oikealle lähtevää

syrjähaaraa; sitten neljänteen oikealle haaraantuvaan käytävään ja
kolmen käytävän risteykseen; siinä taaskin oikealle painautuen
vasempaan seinään välttääkseni kuilun. Tämän käytävän päässä
joudun kiertoportaille, joita myöten minun on mentävä alas eikä
ylös. Siitä pitäen on vain yksi käytävä ilman haaraantumia."

Ja muistin myöskin, mitä ovea hän oli puhuessaan osoittanut.

Pian olin rientämässä tuntematonta tietä enkä ollut vähääkään

varovainen, vaikka tiesinkin, että siellä saattoi olla suuria vaaroja
väijymässä.

Paikoitellen oli käytävä sysipimeä, mutta enimmäkseen se oli

kohtalaisen hyvin valaistu. Pimeintä oli sillä kohdalla, missä minun oli
liikuttava aivan kiinni vasemmanpuolisessa seinässä välttääkseni
kuilun, ja olin jo vähällä suistua jyrkänteen reunalta syvyyteen,
ennenkuin älysin saapuneeni vaarallisen paikan läheisyyteen.

Oli jätetty vain kaita, tuskin kolmenkymmenen sentimetrin

levyinen reuna; sitä myöten salaisuuden tunteva henkilö pääsi
kammottavan syvänteen ohitse, johon outo varmasti olisi suistunut
heti ensi askelella. Mutta vihdoin olin ehein nahoin sen toisella
puolella, ja senjälkeen oli käytävässä loppuun asti siksi valoisaa, että
lattia näkyi selvästi. Juostuani vielä jonkun matkaa pääsin tunnelin
päähän ja astuin päivänvaloon lumi- ja jääkentälle.