In the middle of the night, when everybody else was asleep, White woke him and passed over a note. In this, as a fellow-Australian, he offered any sort of assistance that might be acceptable. Then he handed Hill some chocolate and biscuits taken from a newly arrived parcel. These the scarecrow accepted, and, not daring to whisper in case somebody were listening, wrote a sanely worded message thanking White for the offer, which he accepted. It contained also a warning that, for safety's sake, the other Britishers must be led to believe that both he and Jones were mad. Thereafter White fed him secretly each night. In the daytime he maintained his long fast, to the great astonishment of the Turks. White also helped by complaining that the madman woke him at night-time, and asked him to pray. Later, having heard escape talk between White and me, Hill wrote down an address where we might hide in Constantinople, and let me into the secret that he was pretending lunacy, so as to be sent out of the country as a madman. Now that I knew the scarecrow and Ahmed Hamdi Jones to be as sane as myself, I marvelled at their flawless presentation of different aspects of lunacy, and at the determination which allowed them to play their strange parts for months. Hill, in particular, had a difficult rôle, and I wondered that his mind never gave way under it. To sit up in bed for twelve hours a day, reading and rereading a Bible; to talk to nobody and look at nobody, and to show no sign of interest when vital subjects were being discussed by fellow-prisoners a few yards away; to pray aloud for nearly half an hour each morning and evening, in the presence of a dozen people; to maintain an expression of rigid melancholy, and not to let even the ghost of a smile touch one's features for many weeks--this must require almost inhuman concentration. Jones had a far better time, for his specialty was not studied tragedy but spontaneous farce. He seemed to enjoy enormously the complete fooling of all around him, the planning of a new fantasy and the head-over-heels performance of it, without being restrained by convention or ridicule, or a sense of the normal. Cheerful lunacy, in fact, is great fun. Even in my own minor assumptions of a state of unreason I had found it very stimulating and amusing. A mental holiday from logic, custom, the consideration of public opinion and other irksome boundaries of artificial stability is glorious. Itself untrammelled, the mind can watch from a spectator's point of view the patch-work restraints and littlenesses of civilization, and take delight in tilting at them. Often I envied Jones, with his fez, his golden beard and his rôle of Ahmed Hamdi Effendi, as he talked to a group of Turkish officers. They would laugh at him openly; but secretly he would laugh much more heartily at them.