He struggled fiercely for bare life, but he was powerless to loosen that
awful, merciless pressure. The barbaric face that glared into his own
wore a devilish grin, inexpressibly malignant. It danced before his
starting eyes like some hideous spectre seen in delirium, intermittent,
terrible, with blinding flashes of light breaking between. He felt as if
his head were bursting. The agony of suffocation possessed him to the
exclusion of all else. There came a sudden glaze in his brain that was
like the shattering of every faculty, and then, in a blood-red mist, his
understanding passed.
It seemed to him when the light reeled back again that he had been
unconscious for a very long time. He awoke to excruciating pain, of
which he seemed to have been vaguely aware throughout, and found himself
bound hand and foot and slung across the back of a camel. He dangled
helplessly face downwards, racked by cramp and a fiery torment of thirst
more intolerable than anything he had ever known.
Darkness had fallen, but he caught the gleam of torches, and he knew
that he was surrounded by a considerable body of men. The ground they
travelled was stony and ascended somewhat steeply.
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