INDESCRIBABLE EXHAUSTION 
collapsing every few steps. Thus in a day we each col¬ 
lapsed dozens of times. That was the thirteenth day we 
had had no food whatever, barring perhaps a grain of 
salt from the fraudulent anchovy tin, which I had pre¬ 
served in a piece of paper. 
I felt no actual pain, only great emptiness in my 
inside and a curious feeling of nausea, with no wish what¬ 
ever to eat or to drink. Although water was plentiful, 
we hardly touched it at all — only a few drops to moisten 
our feverish lips. That fact interested me greatly, as it 
was absolutely contrary to people’s notions of what hap¬ 
pens when you are starving. All I experienced was in¬ 
describable exhaustion. I felt myself gradually extin¬ 
guishing like a burnt-out lamp. 
Benedicto and Filippe had dreadful nightmares dur¬ 
ing the night, and occasionally gave frantic yells. That 
night Filippe all of a sudden startled us by crying out 
for help; a moment later he collapsed in a faint. When 
he recovered I asked him what was the matter; he said 
in a dazed way that there were people all round us bring¬ 
ing plenty of food to us — an hallucination which was 
soon dispelled when he returned to his senses. 
On September seventeenth we had another painful 
march, without finding a grain of food to eat. Again 
we started our day with a severe thunderstorm, the water 
coming down upon us in bucketsful. Benedicto and 
Filippe were fervently praying the Almighty to strike 
them down by lightning so as to end the daily torture. 
The strain of leading those fellows on was getting 
almost too much for me. The greatest gentleness had 
to be employed, as an angry word would have finished 
them altogether, and they would have lain down to die. 
The rain came down in such torrents that day, and 
we were so soaked, that we had to halt, we three huddling 
together to protect ourselves under the waterproof sheet 
which I used at night as a hammock. When we went on 
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