It was midday now, and above me shone the blaze of an almost vertical sun; thus I found the shade of the drooping palm branches grateful and pleasant--a boon, a blessing.
Lest the savages might be watching me from a distance, I did not attempt to release my hands; but after nearly an hour elapsed, fearing that strength might fail me from the cramped manner in which my arms were bound backward round the tree, I strove to rend the green withes which fettered me to it.
Strain them as I might, the tough and unyielding tendrils of the convolvoli only seemed to tighten, and to cut me as I tore, wrenched, and struggled, without success.
The horror of being left thus defenceless at the mercy of the wild animals with which the forest teemed was so great, that I forgot alike the pangs of hunger and those of thirst, which are greater still; and again and again strove frantically for freedom, until, with the futility of each successive effort, the conviction forced itself upon me, that without human assistance I could never be released, but might perish of starvation, or be devoured alive.
Human assistance! who, then, would be disposed to aid me? And, if so, who would come in time?
And so the hot day passed breathlessly, slowly, and terribly on!
As the burning sun revolved towards the West, the lengthening shadows of the wood went round in the reverse direction, until the level sunbeams cast them far across the arid desert I had traversed so swiftly yesterday; and as the light of evening sank, the hues of that white glistening waste changed to yellow, then to brown, and then to amber.
My arms ached till they seemed in process of being rent from my shoulders: so, panting, hot, breathless, and half dead with thirst, I reclined against that abhorred tree, from which I could in no way free myself.
As evening deepened, the hum of insect life lessened, and the bright-plumed birds of the wilderness were seeking their nests in the foliage above me; but on me their beauty was lost. Even the cock of the Libyan forest, with his purple breast, his crimson and green pinions, was unheeded, as he picked up a few grains of millet at my feet, and passed to his mate in the orange tree.
A raven or two, soaring through the blue immensity of the sky, suggested dreadful thoughts of what I _might be_ on the morrow.