ion pervaded the town
all day, and every day, while night again became a pandemonium of
barbarous sounds--for the tom-tom and flageolet concerts had been
resumed with tenfold virulence since my incarceration--and on one
occasion a terrific uproar announced the arrival of the unhappy
prisoners who had been captured, in order that the festival might lose
nothing of its importance or impressiveness through lack of a sufficient
tale of victims; but I could not detect any indications of an attempt on
the part of any one to communicate with me; and at length the latent
hope that Ama's boast of her influence with her father might be
verified, and that she might succeed in inducing the king to spare me,
died out, and I began to prepare myself, as best I could, to meet
whatever fate might have in store for me with the fortitude befitting a
Christian and an Englishman. But do not suppose that all this while I
was supinely and tamely acquiescing in the fate that awaited me. Far
from it. For the first few days of my captivity my brain was literally
seething with schemes for effecting my escape, most of them wildly
impossible, I admit; but some there were that seemed to promise just a
ghost of a chance of success--until I attempted to put them into effect,
when the vigilance of my guards--with the fear of crucifixion, head
downward, before their eyes--invariably baffled me.

Thus the time passed on until the first day of the Customs dawned, when,
having received a more than usually substantial meal, I was stripped of
the few rags that still covered my nakedness, and, with my hands tightly
bound behind me by a thin but strong raw-hide rope, was led forth to the
great square wherein the Customs were celebrated, and firmly bound to
one of the posts, the erection of which I had witnessed a week earlier.
Of course I was but one of many who were to gasp out their lives in this
dreadful Aceldama; and in a very short time each post, or stake, was
decorated with its own separate victim, some of whom, it seemed, were to
perish by the torture of fire, for after the victims had been secured to
the stakes, huge bundles of faggots, composed of dry twigs and branches,
were piled around some of them. What the fate of the rest of us was to
be there was nothing to indicate, but I had no doubt that it would be
something quite as dreadful as fire; and I had fully made up my mind
that when my turn came I would endeavour, by insult and invective, to