As a punishment for running away I was put in solitary confinement in a goat-pen, where, for a day or two, the old priest and some of the more temperamental of the Arab ladies--the one with his hippo-hide whip and the others with filth and stones--spent most of their idle hours in trying to bring me round to a state of true repentance for my truancy. This treatment raised such a protest from my comrades, however, that finally the guards, on Lieutenant Tanner's undertaking full responsibility for my docility in the future, restored me to full camp privileges. That is to say, I was allowed my fistful of daily rice again, and liberty to hunt my own snails and dig my own roots. Things grew rapidly worse during the next fortnight, and by the middle of March it seemed that the end we had feared and fought against for so long--slow starvation--could not be much longer postponed. No more food was coming in, the snails were breeding and absolutely unfit to eat, and all the roots within a radius that any of us still had the strength to walk to gather were exhausted. Indeed, the strongest of us were by now so weak that we could no longer keep our balance in stooping to pull the roots, but had to kneel and worry them out by digging and tugging. The stock of rice was entirely exhausted early in March, and from that time we lived on practically nothing but a few ounces of goat-meat per man as a daily ration. Famished as we were, even these tiny portions of unsalted meat seemed to nauseate rather than nourish, and in my own case the repulsion for meat engendered during this period has persisted to this day. I am now practically a vegetarian. The plight of our guards was little better than our own, except, of course, that when worst came to worst, they could always abandon us and make their way across the desert to some place where at least subsistence would be obtainable. For ourselves, we were now quite incapable of undertaking any kind of a march at all. Help would have to come to us; it was quite out of the question for us to search for it, even if our guards had been willing to allow us to try. The last two or three days I do not like to think about. We were too weak to venture far afield, and there was little to do but sit about and brood over the fact that even such almost negligible rations as we still had were nearly at an end. We avoided each other as much as possible, and when we did come together tried to speak of anything but _the_ thing that occupied all our minds. And then, from the one quarter concerning which we had long ago given up all hope, help came.