Those hours before the multitude awakened were great hours. Even the smelly courtyard was attractive then. For one could look up from it, right up into the air, and see the great cliff that towered above the church turn gold in the light of the early sun. And the cliff was a great place for birds. Rock pigeons nested there in thousands, and swallows, and scores of beautiful little kestrels; and swifts flew, screaming out over the roofs below. Vultures brought forth their young there, whose first steps were on five hundred feet of empty air.
There is a rock in Ceylon very like the Kara-Hissar, a huge upstanding stump of granite called Sigiriya, the lion rock, and I had spent many happy months there, years before, delving into ruins of fourteen centuries ago. But the Kara-Hissar was good to look upon, apart from the memories it awakened, though memories are intensified in prison. In ordinary life one lives chiefly for the present: but in prison one lives almost entirely on the past and for the future.
It was not long before the pear trees came into blossom, and the white acacia. The sentries had kept us rigorously to the flagged path at first, while they used the garden space beneath the pear trees to grow a narrow bed of potatoes. But, either the potatoes failed, or they tired of the effort, for long before the end of our time there we used to walk freely to the outer edge, from where we could look down upon the town below. The Squire had received a drawing-book and a box of paints, and he used to make pictures there.
While we were in the church, before the potatoes had been abandoned, there was quite an exciting episode connected with an attempt at escape. The hero was a cheery Irishman, whom I will call Bart, the owner of one of the dogs, a beautiful Persian greyhound that he had acquired in Angora. He made up a bundle of food-stuffs and concealed it behind one of the Armenian tombs, where it would be handy when he required it, and so that he could come out of the church empty-handed and unsuspicious in appearance. But one of the guards noticed it, and a special sentry was put on to keep it under observation. It was obviously impossible to start like this, and for the time, at any rate, the attempt had to be abandoned. But it still remained to recover the precious pack and its contents. A Turkish sentry pretending not to watch anything is the most transparent thing in the world. It was easy to see what he was at: he wanted to identify the owner so that he might be cast into a dungeon. But it was not so easy to see how he was to be got rid of while the bag was removed. Bart was prepared to remove it rapidly inside a folding deck-chair, but he wanted an opportunity to grab it unawares. The sacred potatoes gave the key to the solution. I fetched Gumush, the greyhound, on a lead, and the perverse creature ran all over the cherished potatoes. As all the guards were co-partners in the garden, they all rushed to prevent the trespass; and the deed was done. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, that pack was safe in the church and its contents distributed. The sentry recovered his head, gave one look at the tomb, and made tracks for the Commandant’s office. But we heard of it no more. The trap had failed, and the bait was gone.