Later, his clerk found in it the filthy patched shirt or jibba of the Mahdi's army.
"They bring in bodies that were found in the mud, facedown, filthy," she told me.
The strip lights themselves have a film of grime slathered over them "just like those dim, filthy strip lights you find in the back room bars of Portugal", the artist says, as though to bring the texture of an elsewhere to north London.
It is the biggest animal in the picture, a great hairy thing that stands like a man, but with the eye of a bird, and most certainly a creature Rousseau would have been unlikely to find in the filthy, dispiriting cages of the zoo in Paris's Jardin des Plantes.
(My favourite detail on this score is the "cheese-tainer" she finds in their filthy fridge, an invention of Elizabeth's from the 1960s which consists of some bits of ancient Tupperware held together with brown tape and is designed to hold… cheese).
'I wouldn't keep a dog in there', one told me," he reported, adding that he found filthy cells covered in offensive graffiti in cockroach-infested wings.
In all three institutions, Human Rights Watch found filthy conditions, with foul odors in some wards or even feces on the floors due to broken sewage systems.
They were found living in filthy conditions.
He said: "We found filthy, squalid cells covered in old graffiti.
I soon found myself in mud up to my ankles, pools of filthy water in many places at least a foot deep.
