He was worth watching. Every day, we found, he walked about the streets of Aleppo without a guard. Moreover, he was living by himself in a comfortable room. While this exceptional treatment of a prisoner did not prove treachery, the circumstantial evidence was fairly damning. We became as unopened clams when he talked to us. This was the right attitude, for later, when at a concentration camp, we heard of an Indian official who was an out-and-out traitor. Sometimes he was at full liberty in Constantinople, sometimes he talked in railway trains to newly captured prisoners, sometimes he talked with them in hospitals. Once, at a hospital at Mosul, he was placed next to a wounded officer taken in a recent battle. His assumed complaint was influenza. Yet he was given full diet, and his temperature remained normal, while he lay in bed and asked questions about the Mesopotamian campaign. A prisoner of war in the Orient, far more than the traveller, senses the spirit of his surroundings. Temporarily he is of the Orient. Of necessity his captors regard him as somebody more intimate than the transient Westerner who, while moving freely among them, lives according to Western custom and tradition; and of necessity the man who is in the power of Easterns, and forced to live according to Eastern customs, is more likely to realize the mental attitude whereby the crooked road is chosen in preference to the straight, to-morrow never comes, anything unexpected may happen at any time, and--to repeat an illustration of my friend Jean Willi the dragoman--a man may get married in the morning, and be a solitary fugitive for his life in the evening. So it was with us. The continuity of impressions and experiences reacted on me till I forgot to remember that I was an ordinary Englishman, and became as fatalistic and unsurprised as the Turks and Arabs themselves. Somewhere or other, I knew, we should be punished for having wanted to escape. Of what the punishment might consist we guessed nothing, except that it would probably find us quite unprepared. Meanwhile, it was of absorbing interest to sit on the balcony at Aleppo, and watch the crowd in the bazaar. On leaving Aleppo we knew neither the next stage of the journey nor our ultimate destination; and we were content that it should be so, for a future that is certain to be unpleasant is better indefinite than definite. This time our escort consisted of two gendarmes and two soldiers. First we were herded into a third-class compartment, windowless and filthy. Already, before we arrived, unwashed and unkempt peasants had crowded into it; so that our party of eleven was able to occupy seven seats only. One of the gendarmes, who could murder French, advised us never to place our few belongings out of reach. "Or," said he, "we meet darkness and--_pouf!_--everything vanish."