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."
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.
You see, we had written a good many letters from time to time on the
assurance of our guards that they would be handed to the Turks for
forwarding to England. Most of these were probably thrown away or
deliberately destroyed, but, by a kind trick of fate, one written by
myself was taken by the Turks to Sollum when the Senussi occupied that
port. In this letter--no matter how--I managed to indicate that we
were held captive and in danger of starvation at Bir-Hakkim. When the
British retook Sollum this letter, by a second lucky coincidence, was
left behind in the hastily-evacuated quarters of a Turkish officer.