Our daily ration, diminutive from the first, became smaller and smaller as the days went by, and finally, to stave off actual starvation, we began eating snails and the roots of a small plant, with spreading leaves like the arms of an octopus, which grew here and there among the rocks. The roots had a pleasant, nutty flavour--I could eat these few I have kept with the greatest zest at this moment--but snails, roasted in their shells on a camel-dung fire and eaten without salt, were, to say the least, hardly up to that delicacy as served at the Maison Riche. Most of us had a hard time in bringing ourselves to eat them at all, and a few ever came really to like them. One chap, however, a Welsh quartermaster, developed an almost uncanny taste for the things, eating several hundred every day, and actually waxing fat on them. Ever since we have called him the "Snail King." A few days after our arrival at Bir-Hakkim an Arab woman came to our camp with some goats and sheep to sell, but our guards either could not or would not buy them for us. That night, however, a wolf killed one of the sheep, and some of the men, out foraging for snails, found and brought in the half-eaten carcass. Neither the wolf himself, nor the waiting vultures, could have tackled that flesh more voraciously than those half-famished sailors did. III--THE STRANGE TRICK OF FATE It was about this time that we first learned the true reason for the terrible scarcity of food, a scarcity that affected the Arabs as well as ourselves. The Turks, it appeared, had been successful in their intrigues with the Senussi, and the sheikhs of this powerful Arab confederation had declared war upon England and thrown their forces against the Egyptian frontier. Sollum, but lightly held at that time, had been taken, and the Arabs assured us that their armies were marching on Alexandria and Cairo. In retaliation for this treachery, the British Fleet had extended its blockade to the Senussi coast, and the hinterland, barren and almost entirely dependent for food upon Egypt, was already in the grip of famine. The impetuous Arabs were learning their lesson on the "influence of sea-power" by being slowly starved into repentance, and by a strange trick of fate we British sailors, who otherwise would ourselves have been helping to drive the lesson home, were being starved with them. For some reason the guards made us draw our water from the fouler of the two wells, the one from which the animals were watered. We boiled the noisome green liquid, and did our best to render it potable. It was all to little purpose, however, for dysentery soon developed and spread rapidly through the camp. As there were no medicines of any kind whatever available, there was little to do but let the disease run its course. This accentuated the weakening influence of the starvation, and the wonder is that we left no more than four graves behind us in the accursed spot.