The sufferings and disasters of these fourteen hardy Poles were not yet at an end. After their arms had been taken from them, their arrival was reported to the Pasha of Kars, to whom the Russian commandant at Gumri forthwith sent a threatening letter, demanding the bodies of the fugitives. Four days of anxious suspense ensued, during which orderlies rode to and fro, carrying the correspondence between the Pasha and the commandant, and at last the Poles were told that their only chance to avoid being delivered up was instantly to become Mahometans. In this perplexity they accepted the secret offer of the son of a Lasistan bey to aid their flight into the Pashalik of Trebizond. They started in the night with a caravan of armed mountaineers. On the first day they were divided into two parties, which were separated from each other. On the second day, four, out of the six who were with Saremba, disappeared, although they entreated to be left together. Finally, when Saremba awoke upon the third morning, he found himself alone. Thus torn from the true and steadfast friends in whose brave companionship he had faced and surmounted so many perils, his courage deserted him; he wept aloud, and cursed his fate. There was good cause for his grief when he came to know all. The rascally Turk who had facilitated their flight had sold them into slavery. For six months Saremba toiled under a cruel taskmaster, until fever robbed him of his strength; when his owner, Ali Bey, took him to Trebizond, where the Pole had invented the existence of a brother who would pay his ransom. There he obtained the protection of the French consul, was forwarded to Constantinople, married a Greek woman, and managed to eke out an existence. Of the thirteen comrades who had fled with him from Manglis he had never seen or heard anything, and tears fell upon the honest fellow’s weather-beaten moustache as he deplored their probable fate—that of numbers of Polish deserters, who drag out a wretched existence, as slaves to the infidel, in the frontier provinces of Asiatic Turkey. Dr Wagner found his follower’s narrative so striking, and so illustrative of the characteristics of the inhabitants of the trans-Caucasian frontier, that he at once wrote it down in his journal; and he did quite right, for certainly Saremba’s adventures equal, if they do not exceed, in interest, any of the Doctor’s own.