ative village where my father labored, and they took
me, too. They did not know much about our part of the country so
they were compelled to rely upon the men of our village whom they
had captured to guide them. They told me that they never before
had been so far south and that they had heard there was a country
rich in ivory and slaves west of us. They wanted to go there and
from there they would take us north, where I was to be sold into
the harem of some black sultan.

"They often discussed the price I would bring, and that that price
might not lessen, they guarded me jealously from one another so
the journeys were made as little fatiguing for me as possible. I
was given the best food at their command and I was not harmed.

"But after a short time, when we had reached the confines of the
country with which the men of our village were familiar and had
entered upon a desolate and arid desert waste, the Arabs realized
at last that we were lost. But they still kept on, ever toward
the west, crossing hideous gorges and marching across the face of
a burning land beneath the pitiless sun. The poor slaves they had
captured were, of course, compelled to carry all the camp equipage
and loot and thus heavily burdened, half starved and without water,
they soon commenced to die like flies.

"We had not been in the desert land long before the Arabs were
forced to kill their horses for food, and when we reached the first
gorge, across which it would have been impossible to transport the
animals, the balance of them were slaughtered and the meat loaded
upon the poor staggering blacks who still survived.

"Thus we continued for two more days and now all but a handful of
blacks were dead, and the Arabs themselves had commenced to succumb
to hunger and thirst and the intense heat of the desert. As far as
the eye could reach back toward the land of plenty from whence we
had come, our route was marked by circling vultures in the sky and
by the bodies of the dead who lay down in the trackless waste for
the last time. The ivory had been abandoned tusk by tusk as the
blacks gave out, and along the trail of death was strewn the camp
equipage and the horse trappings of a hundred men.

"For some reason the Arab chief favored me to the last, possibly
with the idea that of all his other treasures I could be most easily
transported, for I was young and strong and after the horses were
killed I had walked and kept up with the best of the men