Eventually that great solvent of perplexity, nicotine, came to relieve the awkward situation. First the sergeant accepted a cigarette, then, more diffidently, the sentry. Later I put in my eye-glass again, and convinced them, I think, that its use did not involve the weaving of any unholy spell.
This eye-glass, by the way, survived all the fortunes of captivity. Through it I surveyed the moon-lit plains beyond the Tigris when I planned escape in Mosul, as shall be told in the next chapter. Later it scanned the desert's dusty face for any hope of release. At Afion-kara-hissar it helped me search for a pathway through our guards. At Constantinople it was still my friend. Through it, a month before escape, I looked at the slip of new moon that swung over San Sophia on the last day of Ramazan, wondering where the next moon would find me. And when the next moon came, I watched the sentries by its aid, on the night of our first escape. And it was in my eye when I slipped down the rope to freedom.
But this chapter is getting "gaga." It has a happy ending, however.
One evening when the
". . . little patch of blue, That prisoners call the sky"
had turned to sulky mauve, and the air was heavy with storm, and our fellow-prisoners were depressed, and the Arab guard was bellowing songs outside, and we were peeling potatoes for our dinner by the flicker of lamp-light, and life seemed drab beyond description, there came great news to us. Two other officers had arrived.
Next moment they peered into our den, even as we had done. And they were angry, amazed, unshaven, bronzed by the desert air, even as we had been. There in the doorway, ruddy and fair and truculent like some Viking out of time and place, stood the young pilot I had last seen at Aziziah. He was alive, my friend in the fur coat.
The desert had delivered up its dead!