But, unlike a child, I became absorbed in self. I analysed my moods, and thought gloomily about my health. I mourned my youth, as my hair turned grey. The sorrows of the spinster were mine and the griefs of the middle-aged. The value of material things was magnified. The pleasures of the palate, I confess, assumed an exaggerated importance. I found a new joy in food, and sometimes I dreamed that I was eating. Also I contracted the habit of smoking cigarettes in the middle of the night. And I learnt that the effect of alcohol, when one is very depressed, is like putting in the top clutch of the car of consciousness, so that one runs forward smoothly on the road of life. In short, I enjoyed eating and drinking and smoking in a way that I had never done before, and never will again, I hope. But I know now why public-houses flourish. After my own experience of deathly dullness, I heartily sympathise with those who seek relief in alcohol and nicotine. They may be poison, but in this imperfect world the deadliest poison of all is boredom. Prohibition, as I saw it in Turkey, when tobacco was short, or food was scarce, or alcohol was forbidden, did not impress me as being beneficial. The fact is, we all need stimulant of one sort or another. Normally our work, our home, or our hopes supply this need. Almost everyone in the world is struggling (however carefully they may disguise the fact) to be other than they are, and better (or worse) than they are. We strive after superlatives and are rarely satisfied by them. But in captivity, as in other circumstances of distress, this stay in life, this hope of something different and wish for something _more_, is suddenly removed. We are left without _stimuli_. Nothing seems to matter. One's mental and material habits inevitably relax. A muddy idea seems as good as a clear one--a sloppy suit of clothes serves as well as a tidy one. Energy wanes. But why? The reason is that the average mind cannot live on abstractions. It must grapple with something practical. One must sharpen one's wits on the world, and it is just this that as a prisoner one cannot do. One cannot "lay hold on life," because there is no life to lay hold of, except an unnatural and artificial existence, where the sympathy of women and the dignity of work are absent. That was the crux of the matter. Sympathy and dignity were lacking in our life. We heard of advances and retreats as from another sphere. We read of great heroisms and great sorrows without being close to them. We had no part in the quarrel. We were in a squalid by-way, living out a mean tragedy, while the fate of all we loved was in the balance. Never again would we go fighting. From the moment of our capture we had passed into a strange narrow life, where the spirit of man, while retaining all its old memories and hopes, could not express them in action. Captivity is a minor form of death, and I was dead, to all intents and purposes.