The days now dragged themselves away upon leaden feet, yet--apparent paradox--with frightful rapidity; for I now no longer had a household to attend to my wants; my meals were brought to me with unfailing regularity by my guards, but they had apparently been forbidden to communicate with me, for not a word could I get out of them, good, bad, or indifferent. I was not permitted to show myself in the doorway of my dwelling, or even to approach it nearly enough to see what was going on; and in this dreadful solitude, waiting and hoping for I knew not what impossible happening to occur and effect my deliverance, each day seemed to drag itself out to the length of a month--until the darkness came; and then, with the realisation of the fact that I was so much nearer to a hideous fate, the hours seemed suddenly to have sped with lightning swiftness. The excited buzz and bustle of preparation pervaded the town all day, and every day, while night again became a pandemonium of barbarous sounds--for the tom-tom and flageolet concerts had been resumed with tenfold virulence since my incarceration--and on one occasion a terrific uproar announced the arrival of the unhappy prisoners who had been captured, in order that the festival might lose nothing of its importance or impressiveness through lack of a sufficient tale of victims; but I could not detect any indications of an attempt on the part of any one to communicate with me; and at length the latent hope that Ama's boast of her influence with her father might be verified, and that she might succeed in inducing the king to spare me, died out, and I began to prepare myself, as best I could, to meet whatever fate might have in store for me with the fortitude befitting a Christian and an Englishman. But do not suppose that all this while I was supinely and tamely acquiescing in the fate that awaited me. Far from it. For the first few days of my captivity my brain was literally seething with schemes for effecting my escape, most of them wildly impossible, I admit; but some there were that seemed to promise just a ghost of a chance of success--until I attempted to put them into effect, when the vigilance of my guards--with the fear of crucifixion, head downward, before their eyes--invariably baffled me.