"This is no jesting matter," he said. "I will be killed if I am caught." "But you won't get caught. With the best horses in Arabia and a guide like you. . . ." "Hush, hush! I must think it over." For several days he preserved a tantalising silence, alternately raising our hopes by a wink from his wonderful eye, and then dashing them to the ground by a blank stare. We lived in a torment of hope deferred. But time passed more easily now. The nights took on a new complexion, flushed by the hope of freedom. From our little window I could see across a courtyard to a patch of river. Beyond it, immense and magical under the starlight, were the ruins of former civilisation--the mounds of Nineveh, the tomb of Jonah, and the rolling downs that lead to the mountains of Kurdistan. To those mountains my fancy went. If sleep did not come, then there were enthralling adventures to be lived in those mountains, adventures of the texture of dreams, yet tinged with a certain prospective of reality. . . . We had bought revolvers, our horses were ready, we had bribed our guard. We rode far and fast, with our wall-eyed friend as guide. By evening we were in a great forest. . . . But reality proved a poor attendant on romance. A sordid question of money was our stumbling-block, and a high enterprise was crippled--not for the first or last time--by want of cash. We had already given the interpreter five pounds (which represented so much bread taken out of our mouths), but now he stated that further funds were indispensable to arrange preliminaries. This seemed reasonable, for arms and horses could not be secured on credit in Mosul. Unfortunately, however, funds were not available. We could not, in decency, borrow from other prisoners to help us in our escape. At this juncture our guide, philosopher, and friend lost--or embezzled--a five-pound note that had been entrusted to him by another prisoner to buy us food. Whether he lost it carelessly or criminally I am not prepared to state, but the fact remains he lost it. Our fellow-prisoner very naturally complained to the Turks, as the absence of this five pounds meant we could buy no food for a week. The Turks arrested the interpreter. He grew frightened, invented a story about the complainant having asked him to help in an escape, then recanted, vacillated, contradicted himself, and got himself bastinadoed for his pains. The bastinado, I may as well here explain, is administered as follows: the feet of the victim are bared, and his ankles are strapped to a pole. The pole is now raised by two men to the height of their shoulders. A third man takes a thick stick about the diameter of a man's wrist, and strikes him on the soles of the feet. Between twenty and a hundred strokes are administered, while the victim writhes until he faints. No undue exertion is necessary on the part of the executioner, for even after a gentle bastinado a man is not expected to be able to walk for several days.