A day in The Rock.

The bright California sun held no heat.  We huddled on the bow of the ferry, watching the island grow on the horizon.  Through the haze of not quite fog, not quite smog the Golden Gate bridge hung like a beacon.

Where we were going, a lot of people never came back.

It needs theme music.

"There's a real history here," the ranger told us.  "You can see it in the layers of the rock, painted on the walls."

He was right, it was everywhere; the litter of the soldiers, the scratchings of prisoners, the paint of protests.

"They made a lot of good movies here," the Skeptic said afterwards.

He was right, too.

The many stages of Alcatraz history are obvious as you disembark.

Audio tours walked us through the prison.  Voices from the past told stories which brought life to the stones, made sense of an environment we couldn't otherwise understand.  Stories of what men had done outside this place, ending up here.  Stories of what they had done while they wilted in these walls.

The recreation yard.

In the dank corners, behind heavy bars are the stories which never escaped the dark.  The places where men had nothing left but their sanity and held that tight.

The Skeptic shows off the size of the hole.

The whole the marines used to bomb inmates during the Battle of Alcatraz.

And on the horizon, the unreachable city, deceptively close.  The bright sun made a lie of the autumn chill.  How far could a man swim, we wondered, before the water froze his bones, and the cold sucked the air from his lungs? How far would he make it across the bay he could never escape?

There's quite a good view of the San Francisco skyline from the officer's quarters.

Yet there was colour here too, colour brought by the men who escaped this place.  Some escaped through paint and canvas, words and paper.  Some escaped by steel and broken stone, determination.  Both had their place in the history of these rocks.

One of the cells made famous by the film Escape from Alcatraz.

And we left.  These days people do.