Our new prison was one of the best built houses in Yozgad, empty of all furniture, it is true (except the chair and table we had each brought with us), but large, airy, and comparatively clean. From the front windows we had a view of the Commandant’s office and the main street. From the side we looked into “Posh Castle,” where now lived our friends Doc., Price and Matthews; and at the back there was a tiny cobbled yard, with high walls round it, and a large stone horse-trough, which we promptly converted into that real luxury—a full-length bath. To the south-east we had a wide view of the distant pine-woods, and nearer at hand a certain grey rock projected through the snow on the slope of South hill. Under its shadow lay the first clue to the treasure.

Indoors, if we wished it, we could each have a bedroom, a dining-room and a study, and still leave a spare suite for the chance guest. Furniture? Simple enough! Move your chair and table to wherever you want to sit, and there you are! When we arrived some of our friends were waiting to see the last of us. Our escort hustled them out. The door slammed, the key grated in the lock, and a sentry took up his stand outside. Our separation from the camp was complete, and our solitary confinement had begun.

It was natural that Hill and I should be elated at the success of our plan. The simultaneous hoodwinking of friend and foe had for us an amusing side. But mingled with our elation and our amusement was a feeling which no loyalty to our friends in the camp could suppress. For we rejoiced, above all, in our loneliness, in our freedom from interruption, in the fact that we were quit of the others. I make the confession knowing that any fellow-prisoner who chances on this story will understand and sympathize. The longing for a little solitude was shared by us all.

It must not be imagined that the prison walls of Yozgad enclosed a company of particularly obnoxious irreconcilables, or that we were a shiftless crew who gave in to the discomforts of their situation. Far from it. A more companionable set of men never existed, and during our stay in Yozgad we overcame every difficulty but one. For instance: to begin with, there was an entire absence of furniture. Yozgad was no Donnington Hall, and the Turks provided nothing but a roof to our heads, and a bare floor—sometimes of stone—for us to lie on. The camp purchased empty grocery boxes, acquired a saw, a hammer, a plane, and nails, and some of our prisoners evolved designs in chairs and tables and beds which would have done credit to Maple’s. Our food, both in quality and price, was appalling; we learned to cook, and before we left Yozgad there were Messes which could turn out on occasion a five-course dinner that left nothing to be desired. We had no games. Busy penknives soon remedied the deficiency; chessmen, draughts, roulette-wheels, toboggans, looges, skis, hockey-sticks, and hockey-balls were turned out to meet the demand. There was no end to the ingenuity of individuals in supplying their wants or adding to their few comforts. We had cobblers of every grade, from an artist like Colonel Maule, who made himself a pair of rope-soled shoes, to “Tony,” whose only boots, owing to their patches, were of different size and vastly different design—indeed, it required a stretch of the imagination to realize they had once been a pair. We had knitters who could unravel a superfluous “woolly” and convert it into excellent socks, heels and all. We had tailors whose efforts (being circumscribed by the paucity of cloth) would have brought tears of delight to the eyes of Joseph. In every house there was an embryo Harrod who kept a “store” containing everything, “from a needle to an anchor,” that the Turks would allow him to buy, and an accountant who evolved a system of book-keeping and book-transfer of debts which enabled those under a temporary financial cloud (a thing to which we were all subject, thanks to the irregularity of the Ottoman post) to continue making necessary purchases until the next cheque arrived.

These were all material difficulties, and easily adjusted. Our chief problem was how to pass the time. It was tackled in a similar spirit and with nearly equal success. We had four-a-side hockey tournaments^[20] and (when the Turks allowed) walks, picnics, tobogganing, and ski-ing. There was one glorious point-to-point ski race over the snow-clad hills, with flag-wagging signallers along the course, bookmakers and a selling sweep, and to cap it all a magnificent close finish. That was a red-letter day. Later on there was to be a Hunt Club, with long dogs and foxes and hares complete.

For indoor amusement we wrote dramas, gay and serious, melodramas, farces and pantomimes. We had scene-painters whose art took us back to England (we could sit all day looking at the “village-green” scene). We had an orchestra of prison-made instruments, a prison-trained male-voice choir and musicians to write the music for them. Artists, song-writers, lecturers, poets, historians, novelists, actors, dramatists, musicians and critics—especially critics—all these we evolved in the effort to keep our minds from rusting. Indeed, we went beyond mere amusement in the effort: we went to school again! When at last books began to arrive from England a library was formed, and classes were held in Mathematics, Physics, Political Economy, French, German, Spanish, Hindustani, Electricity, Engineering, Machine Drawing, Agriculture and Sketching. We became a minor University, with Professors who made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in experience. Memories of their own youth made some of them set “home work,” and it was no uncommon thing to run across a doughty warrior, most unacademically dressed in ragged khaki, seeking in vain for some quiet corner of the garden where he might wrestle uninterrupted with the latest vagaries of x, or convert into graceful Urdu a sonorous passage from the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Nor did we await the tardy arrival of books to commence our education. Barely had we settled down in Yozgad when some genius realised that the hundred officers and men whom the Turk had collected haphazard within our prison walls possessed amongst them a rich and varied experience. Our genius had a persuasive tongue. He organized lectures. Once a week, after dinner, we of the Upper House gathered in the only place that would hold us all together—the landing. It was unfurnished, dark, and draughty. Each man brought his own chair, each room provided a candle or a home-made lamp. Wrapped in blankets, rugs, bedquilts, sheepskins, anything we possessed to keep out the cold, and packed together like sardines, we settled down to what in those days was the one entrancing hour in the dull week. And what lectures those were! With men who had done or helped to do these things we entered the Forbidden City and shared in the taking of Pekin, combated sleeping-sickness in Central Africa, tea-planted in Ceylon, cow-punched in America, chased criminals in Burma, joined in the Jameson Raid, fruit-farmed in Kent, organized an army for an Indian Princeling, defended a great Channel Port, fought in a Frontier War, went geologizing in the Sudan, and trained the Rangoon river. We controlled in turn a Royal Mint, a great jute mill, a battery of Field Artillery, a colour-photography studio, a submarine, a police-court in England, a wireless telegraphy station, a pork factory, a torpedo-boat, and a bee-farm.

The list is not exhaustive, but it may serve its turn. Such were the men with whom we had spent nearly two years of our lives. In a month of marching you could not fall in with company more varied, more interesting, or more charming. Yet, because amongst the many difficulties that had been overcome one remained unsolved, Hill and I were glad to get away. Nothing in captivity is so distressing, so discomforting, so impossible to allay as overcrowding, and the unhappy consequences it brings in its train. It is a cancer that eats into the heart of every unnatural form of society. Time is its ally, and slowly but surely it wears down all opposition. In Yozgad we did not quarrel—we got along without that—and we tried not to complain. But every now and then a man would seek relief. As unostentatiously as might be he would change his mess, and though nothing was said, we all knew why. He knew, and we knew, that he was not getting rid of the bonds that were so irksome. He was merely seeking to exchange the old for the new pattern of handcuff, in the hope that it would not gall him in the same raw spot, and we could sympathize with him. Your neighbour may be the most excellent of good fellows, but if he is jogging your elbow for every hour of the twenty-four you will begin to look askance at him. Little idiosyncracies that would pass unmarked in ordinary life assume the magnitude of positive faults. Faults grow into unendurable sins. The fine qualities of the man—his endurance, his courage, his cheerfulness, his generosity—are lost to sight under the cloud of minor peculiarities that close acquaintance brings into view. Indeed, in time, his very virtues may be counted unto him as vices. His stoicism becomes a “pose,” his cheerfulness is “tomfoolery,” his generosity “softness,” his courage “rashness“! We knew the worth of the men beside us, but we were being forced to examine them under the microscope. So we were in constant danger of taking the part for the whole, and of losing all sense of proportion. Z was a glorious leader of men: we forgot it—because he snored in his sleep! Distance lends enchantment, because it puts things into their true proportions. To realize the grandeur of a mountain the climber must stand back from it, at least once in a while. And so it is with character.

I do not know if others—leaders of Arctic Expeditions, for instance—are wont to succeed much better than we did in solving the problems of maintaining feelings of mutual respect amongst their company. Certain it is they have a great advantage over us, because, for them, the close companionship is voluntary and (what is more important) necessary to the attainment of a common object. For us, it was compulsory, and the common object that palliates it was entirely wanting. But we did our best. Outwardly we succeeded; there was no public break in the harmony of our camp. Yet in our hearts every one of us knew that he had failed, and that our only achievement had been to fail in a very gentlemanly way.

Our new-found solitude came to Hill and myself in a good hour, while the friendships we had formed in the camp were green and the canker-worm of super-intimacy still in its infancy. For we had left behind many friends and, as far as we knew, no enemies. In front of us stretched a prospect of an indefinite period of unrelieved companionship with one another. What dangers to our mutual friendship this involved we knew too well. But we had that on our side which would have relieved the camp of its most serious trouble—a common aim. We no longer merely existed. We were partners in a great enterprise. There was something definite for which to work, something which would compensate us for every hardship—our hope of freedom.

Absurd as it may seem, Hill and I felt not only happier, but actually freer in our new prison than we had done in the camp. On the face of things there was no excuse for this feeling, for outwardly we were more closely confined than ever. In order to give a fitting air of verisimilitude to his proceedings, Kiazim Bey had issued the strictest orders to our sentries. Indeed, he went rather out of his way to describe us as a pair of desperate characters, and so upset the nerves of our old “gamekeepers” that for the first few days of our confinement they marched up and down outside our house, instead of snoozing in their sentry-boxes as they had been accustomed to do. The genial, wizened little Corporal, Ahmed Onbashi, whose duty it was to verify the presence of all prisoners night and morning, lost all the bonhomie which had made him a favourite, and for at least a week we saw no more of him than a wrinkled nose and a single anxious eye peering at us round the gently opened door of our room. But as the days passed by and we showed no signs of hostility, he gradually regained his old confidence. His escort dropped from two veterans with rifles at the “ready” to the accustomed one with no rifle at all. At last he came one night boldly into the room, and catching sight of our spook-board propped against the wall, he pointed a grimy finger at it, shook his head at us, and uttered one of the very few Turkish phrases that was understood of all the camp—“Yessack! ChÔk fena!” (Forbidden! Very bad!) From which we learned that the cause of our downfall was known to our humble custodian.

The stricter surveillance did not in the least affect our happiness for it had been suggested by the Spook, and our present circumstances were of our own choosing. We knew that, within certain limits, we could lighten or tighten our bonds as we pleased, for we had gained some control over the forces that controlled us. We were no longer utterly and entirely under the orders of the un-get-at-able Turk. We had the Spook as an ally, and the Spook could make the Commandant sit up.

There was another reason, deeper and more permanent, for this curious, instinctive sense of increased liberty which came to us, and expressed itself in the enthusiastic enjoyment with which we submitted to a more stringent form of imprisonment. At the time we could not have put the reason into words, but it was there all the same, and it was this: so far as we ourselves were concerned, we were well on the way to correct the one serious mistake which the camp as a whole had committed. It was the mistake that lies at the core of all tragedies. We in Yozgad had put the lesser before the greater good, our duty to ourselves, as prisoners, before our duty to ourselves, as men, and to our country. For reasons that have been stated it was considered wrong to attempt to escape. The general feeling was that there was no choice but to wait for peace with such patience as we could muster. We all knew the value of what we had lost when we surrendered to the Turk. But not one of us realized clearly that since our capture we had surrendered something infinitely more precious than physical freedom. It was not the supremacy of the Turk but our own recognition of it and our resignation to captivity that made us moral as well as physical prisoners. We did not see that in giving up trying to free ourselves we were giving up our one hope of happiness until peace came. So that in spite of the outward cheerfulness, the brave attempts at industry, and the gallant struggle against the deterioration that a prison environment brings, an atmosphere of hopelessness pervaded the whole camp. At heart, we were all unhappy, for we had created for ourselves an “Inevitable.” The camp had built a prison within a prison, and he who wished to run had to defeat the vigilance of his own comrades before he could tackle the Turk. It is perhaps too much to say that it is a man’s duty to escape, but certainly it is not his duty to bar the way to escape either for himself or for anyone else. Had every prisoner in Yozgad bent his energies to achieve freedom not only for himself but for his fellows, things would have been very different in the camp. Strafed the camp might have been, but it would have been in its duty, happy in discomfort instead of miserable in comparative ease, and welded into unity by a common aim. Prisoners most of us would have remained, but not beaten captives; the victims of misfortune, but not its slaves.

In getting away from the camp Hill and I had gained a new and more cheerful outlook. But we did not realize that we had already broken down the walls of our moral prison. There was no time to analyse the causes of our happiness. We were obsessed with the immediate situation, and especially with the necessity of getting the proof of Kiazim Bey’s complicity which would make the camp safe. Kiazim was not an easy man to trap: up to date there was nothing he could not explain by a theory of collusion between his subordinates and ourselves. He was perfectly capable of sacrificing the Pimple in order to save his own skin. He could range himself alongside Gilchrist and the other witnesses, and pose as the victim of a plot in which he had had no share. When alone with us he was as frank and open as a man could be. But we had no proof of his share in the plot. With typical Oriental cunning he kept himself well in the background. There was no hope of getting him to commit himself in the presence of others; yet, by hook or by crook, we must produce independent evidence that he was implicated in the treasure-hunt.

Weeks ago we had conceived the idea of snapshotting Kiazim Bey, his satellites and ourselves, digging for the hidden gold. Cameras are a luxury forbidden to prisoners of war, but Hill had made one out of a chocolate box and half a lens, to fit films which a fellow-prisoner possessed.^[21] The drawback to the camera was its bulk—it measured about twelve inches each way—which rendered concealment difficult. He had had serious thoughts of making the attempt with this as a last resort, but found a better way. On our first night in the Colonel’s House Hill put into my hands a Vest-Pocket Kodak, belonging to Wright, which somehow or another had escaped notice at the time of the latter’s capture. Films to fit it had arrived in a parcel, and Hill had palmed them under the nose of the Turkish censor while “helping” him to unpack. He explained to me that as the films were his own, and the camera without films was only a danger to Wright, he had “borrowed” it for our purposes without asking permission. It contained three films still unexposed—which would prove three ropes for the neck of Kiazim Bey, or for that of the photographer, according as the Goddess of Fortune smiled on Britisher or Turk.

It is not easy to take a group photograph at seven paces (the limit, we reckoned, for recognition of the figures) without somebody noticing what is being done. Discovery would be dangerous, for we were now very much in the Commandant’s power. It was no new idea to the Turkish mind, as we knew from the Pimple, to get rid of a man by shooting him on the plea that he was attempting escape; and in our case the camp was more than likely to believe the excuse. Besides, there are many other Oriental ways of doing away with undesirables, and if Kiazim Bey caught us trying to trap him he would regard us as extremely undesirable. Now that we were actually up against the situation it looked much less amusing than it had done from the security of the camp.

“It’s neck or nothing,” I grumbled. “If we’re spotted everything goes smash, and we’ll probably be in for it. I’m hanged if those fellows in the camp who cussed us for nuisances are worth the risk.”

We were still pondering gloomy possibilities when heavy footsteps sounded on our stairs, and paused on the landing outside.

“Htebsi-gituriorum-effendiler-htebsi-i-i.”

Hill and I looked at each other. The noise was like nothing on earth.

“Htebsi-gituriorum-htebsi-i-i-i,” again.

“Somebody sneezing, I think,” said Hill, and opened the door.

It was the Commandant’s second orderly. We never knew his name, so because he was in rags, and looked starved, and had the biggest feet in Asia, we called him “Cinderella” for short.

In his hands was an enormous blue tray, piled with enamel dishes, from which came a most appetising odour of baked meats. Cinderella advanced cautiously into the room. He was obviously afraid of us two criminals, but he was much more nervous about the tray. He wore the look I have seen on the face of a bachelor holding a baby, and seemed to expect everything to come to pieces in his great hands. Very gingerly he sidled round the table, keeping it between him and ourselves, and placed the tray upon it.

“Htebsi!” he said again with a sigh of relief, and pointing to the tray he left us.

“He was not sneezing after all, Bones. ‘Htebsi’ must mean grub or something. Let’s see.” Hill began to uncover the dishes, I helping him.

“Soup!” said he.

“Meat—roast mutton!” said I, lifting a second cover.

“Potatoes—by Jove!”

“Nettle-top spinach!!”

“Chocolate pudding!!!” Hill cried.

I peered into the only remaining dish—a small jug.

“Coffee!” I gasped, and collapsed into a chair. Compared with our customary dinner it was a feast for the gods. It came, as we knew, from “Posh Castle,” for under the Spook’s instructions the Commandant had requested that mess to send us food. It was the nearest prisoners’ house and therefore, we thought, it was the natural thing for the Commandant to do. Of course, we had no manner of claim on “Posh Castle,” but as we were putting ourselves to a certain amount of trouble for the sake of the camp, we had considered it right and proper they should do our cooking for us for a day or two. But we had not reckoned on their killing the fatted calf in this way, and our consciences pricked us.

“This,” said Hill in a very contrite voice, “this is the work of old Price——”

“Who believes in the Spook,” I groaned. “I’ve been stuffing him with lies for a year.”

“Oh, what a pair of swine we are,” we said together.

I took the camera from under the mattress where I had hidden it when Cinderella appeared, and gave it back to Hill.

“I think, Hill, that risk or no risk——”

“Of course!” he snapped at me. “It’s got to be done now! And if it comes off, Posh Castle gets the photos. Have some soup?”

It was a merry dinner, and the coffee at the end was nectar.

“Now,” said Hill, by way of grace after meat, “let us begin to minimize that risk. Watch me!”

For fifteen minutes I stood over him, my eyes on his clever hands, watching for a glimpse of the camera as over and over again he took it out, opened it, sighted it, closed it, and returned it to his pocket. I rarely saw it until it was ready in position, and then only the lens peeped through his fingers, but when I did I told him. It was the first of a series of daily practices.

“Once I know the feel of it I’ll do better,” he said at the end; “I should be pretty good in about three weeks.”

“You’re pretty good now, but where does my part come in?”

“You’ll have to talk like a blooming machine-gun, to drown the click of the shutter, and——” Hill grinned and paused.

“Yes?”

“Well, if it is a dull day, it will be a time exposure, and you’ll have to pose the blighters, of course.”

I retired to my corner to think it out.