exquisite; blood leaps out at the first cut, and strong men usually
faint after thirty or forty strokes. Strange to say, the worst part of
it is not the blow itself, but the whistling of the rod through the air
as it rushes to its mark. The groans of my older comrades, whose gasps
and prayers I could hear through the walls of the cell, helped me bear
the agony until unconsciousness mercifully came to the rescue.

For several days more we were kept in the prison, sick and broken with
suffering. The second night, as I lay sleepless and desperate on the
strip of dirty matting that served as bed, I heard a scratch-scratching
at the grated slit of a window, and presently a slender stick was
inserted into the cell. I went over and shook it; some one at the other
end was holding it firm. And then, a curious whispering sound began to
come from the end of the stick. I put my ear down, and caught the voice
of one of the men from our village. He had taken a long bamboo pole,
pierced the joints, and crept up behind a broken old wall close beneath
my window. By means of this primitive telephone we talked as long as we
dared. I assured him that we were still enduring, and urged him on no
account to give up the arms to the Turkish authorities--not even if we
had to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Finally, when it was found that torture and imprisonment would not make
us yield our secret, the Turks resorted to the final test--the ordeal
which we could not withstand. They announced that on a certain date a
number of our young girls would be carried off and handed over to the
officers, to be kept until the arms were disclosed. We knew that they
were capable of carrying out this threat; we knew exactly what it meant.
There was no alternative. The people of our village had nothing to do
but dig up the treasured arms and, with broken hearts, hand them over to
the authorities.