Morning merged into afternoon, the afternoon lengthened into evening, and no policeman came. We were safe.
At nightfall, after sending Hyppolité as a scout up the stairs to see that the other lodgers were not about, we ascended to our room again, and settled down definitely.
Our stay, we then thought, might last several weeks, so as to give us leisure to weigh the reliability of the various routes and guides that offered. There was no particular hurry. The longer we stayed, the more likely the Turks would be to relax such measures as they had taken for our recapture.
But we had reckoned without our host: the host of vermin. They were worse in this room than in any other place I have seen in Turkey, not excepting the lowest dungeons of the military prison, where they breed by the billion. Their voracity and vehemence made a prolonged stay impossible. Except for the first sleep of two hours, when exhaustion had made us insensible, we never thereafter had more than a single hour of uninterrupted rest.
Throughout the long and stifling nights of our stay, Robin and I lay in the stately double bed, wondering wearily how any man or woman alive could tolerate the creatures that crawled over its mahogany-posts and swarmed over its flowered damask. Every three-quarters of an hour, one or other of us used to light a candle, and add to the holocaust of creatures we had already slain.
"What hunting?" I used to ask sleepily.
"A couple of brace this time, and a cub I chopped in covert," Robin would say.
"That makes twenty-two couple up to date—and the time is 12.35 a.m."
Then at one o'clock it was Robin's turn to ask what sport I had had.
"A sounder broke away under your pillow," I reported. "Six rideable boar and six squeakers."