He passed a sleepless night until within an hour or two of morning, when he dozed off into a pained and dreamful slumber, from which he was roused at daybreak by Mahmoud himself. To his great surprise and grief, the beach was almost deserted. Some armed Indians still lay near the white ashes of the dead fires, but his men, the other Arab, and all the rest of the Somalis were gone.
“Eat,” said Mahmoud, “you have far to go.” He placed a dish of fragrant curry before him as he spoke, and Harry partook of it mechanically.
“Where am I to be taken to?” he inquired of this warlike priest.
“Ask nothing,” was the reply. “I have saved your life, be thankful to Allah. Prepare to march.”
Surrounded by armed, grinning Somalis, many bearing parcels on their heads, with Mahmoud trudging on in front, the journey was commenced, straight away across the sandy hills, where only here and there some little tuft of grass or some pale green weed was growing.
At the top of the ridge Harry, in spite of his guard, paused for a moment to look back. Never, he thought, had the sea looked more lovely. Save where in whitish yellow patches the coral shoals were showing, the whole surface, unrippled by a wavelet, was of a deep cerulean blue. Here and there a shark’s fin made the water tremble, and here and there a white bird floated.
“Oh,” he thought, “could he only be as free as one of those happy sea-birds! But never again,” he sighed; “no, never again!”
Even in the morning the sun was fiercely hot, but towards noon it became almost insupportable, and Harry was glad indeed when green things appeared at last, and the halt was made in the shade of a little forest land—a kind of oasis in a barren desert. Here was a cool spring and a few cocoanut trees.
Some of the Somalis climbed these as one climbs a ladder, holding on like monkeys to little stirrup-like steps that ran all up one side of the trees. They then cut and threw down some of the greenest, and Harry, in grief though he was, was glad enough to regale himself on the proffered fruit. They were filled principally with “milk,” for the nut itself was hardly yet formed, otherwise than as a transparent jelly.
It may interest some of my young readers to know how the water or milk of the cocoanut is got at, after the great nut has been thrown to the ground by the monkey-like boy in the tree.