Lying down in as sheltered a place as I could find, I rested till nightfall before setting off again on my way. By morning my water, my toe-nails, and my strength were gone, on top of which I stumbled straight into a camp of nomad Arabs. Flight was out of the question, so I made the best of a bad situation by trying to induce them, in my fragmentary Arabic, to take me to the coast. They understood me all right, and appeared not a little tempted by the prospect of the double handful of gold I promised them. They debated the question for a while, but in the end their fear of the Turk was too strong, and they decided I must be delivered to the nearest Ottoman post. My captors were not unkind to me; indeed, they treated me rather as a prized animal pet, a sort of dancing bear, than a dangerous captive. They exhibited me to everyone they met along the way, even made a point of travelling circuitously in order to show their strange find to some encampments that would otherwise have missed the treat. They never ceased to marvel at my ability to tell the direction without a compass and the time without a watch--simple tricks for a sailor--and seeing it kept them good-natured, I made a point of going through my tricks whenever they wanted them. The Turks to whom I was finally brought were just as courteous and sympathetic as those to whom we had been delivered on landing, and they cannot be blamed for deciding that I should be returned to the camp at Bir-Hakkim. They were probably hard up for food themselves. IV--HORRORS OF THE DESERT MARCH I hardly care to go into details about that return journey. Except that it was two or three days of horrible nightmare, my memory of it is a good deal confused, and I am rather thankful that such is the case. I am afraid there were some things I shouldn't care to remember too clearly. A fanatical old Senussi priest had come to fetch me, and he rode on a camel and drove me ahead of him with a long hippo-hide whip all the way. They gave me no food and no water for two days, and my one clear recollection of the whole time is of gulping down the nearly-hatched eggs from a lark's nest I stumbled upon, and of the horrible revulsion of my outraged stomach as the nauseous mess entered it. But I'd really rather not speak about that little interval at all. Something of the nature of what Captain Gwatkin-Williams had to go through on this journey may be inferred from this entry in the diary of one of the _Tara_ men, under date of February 29th:-- "About 3 p.m. we suddenly heard rifle-shots to the northward. A few minutes later there appeared over the brow of a small hill some men and camels, and there, walking apart from the rest, was our brave captain. We were now witness of one of the most degrading and brutal sights it has ever been my lot to see. He was lashed with an elephant thong whip, and the guard punched him violently in the face. Then the women came up and pelted him with the largest stones they could find."