Page:A Prisoner of the Khaleefa.djvu/160

118 a dying child, he is committed to an oriental prison, and there, as he is taken to the anvil, the body of the last victim to starvation is dragged up to have the shackles knocked off only to be fitted on to him. Yet this happened not twice, not scores, but hundreds of times in the prison of es-Saier during that terrible famine.

After my servant Hasseena had been knocked down a number of times and the food she was bringing me had been devoured by the starving prisoners, we hit upon an expedient. Buying a gazelle skin, she had this hung from her waist, under her dress, and left dangling between her knees; the food for me was placed in this, but Hasseena always carried, as a blind or decoy, a little food in her hands. This would be pounced upon, when Hasseena, who had a healthy pair of lungs, as Wad Nejoumi discovered at his first interview with her, would raise the echoes with her screams. These gave her a clear path to me, and she waited for a favourable opportunity to drop the gazelle skin on the ground beside me.

It must not be thought from the foregoing that the prisoners had no feelings for each other, and for those worse off in the matter of food than themselves. There was more charity shown by those wild fanatics, and almost savages, than is often shown in more civilized places. Mahmoud Wad Said, so long as his little property held out, sold portions of it day after day, and had sent into the prison for his poorer fellowprisoners, a large "geddahh" of asseeda and milk, night and morning, and this gave thirty to forty