Page:A Prisoner of the Khaleefa.djvu/157

Rh surreptitiously passing to me the dainties he had brought in the old leather bag slung from his left shoulder. Time after time he was turned away from the gates, and this, too, after having paid the baksheesh; but his persistence secured his seeing me every one or two months during my first three years in prison, and the scraps of news he brought from the outside world — news to both of us, though a year or two old — gave me something to think of and turn over in my brain until his next visit. Death, as I told Father Ohrwalder, I did not fear, but my great fear was insanity.

Often and often, when allowed to sleep in the Open air at night-time, instead of experiencing all the horrors of a night in the common cell, the cool night-air would send me off into a sound sleep, from which I would start up from some confused dream of old days, and, looking up to the sky, would wonder to myself, half awake and half asleep, which was the dream and which the reality, the old loved scenes, or the prison of es-Saier at Omdurman. I would for some moments be afraid to look round at the men chained on each side of me, and when I mustered up courage to do so, and felt the weight of my irons and the heavy chain across my legs, which bound our gang of fifty or sixty together, 1 would speculate on how long it would be before the slender thread holding me between reason and insanity snapped under the strain.

That my reason did not give way during my first period of imprisonment I have but to thank Father