And then, when the fetters had been removed, and two
of the bars in the narrow window had been sawn through,
there came the great moment. The prisoner was
now free to tear his sheet and his blanket and his
underclothes into strips, and plait himself a rope.
One had to time this for the summer, of course.
One couldn’t go cutting up one’s shirt
in the middle of winter. So, upon a dark night
in August, the prisoner tied his rope to the remaining
bar, squeezed through the window, and let himself
down into space. Was the rope long enough?
It wasn’t, of course; it never was. But,
once at the end of it, the prisoner would realize,
his senses quickened by the emergency, that it was
too late to go back. From the extreme end he
breathed a prayer and dropped.... Splash! And
five minutes later he was embracing Araminta.
There was no pursuit; they were sportsmen in those
days, and it was recognized that he had won.
That is the classic mode of escape. But there
are variants of it which I am prepared to allow.
The goaler may have a daughter, who, moved by the
romantic history and pallor of the prisoner, may exchange
clothes with him. The prisoner may pass himself
off for dead, may be actually buried, and then rescued
from the grave just in time by the pre-warned and
ever-ready Araminta. There are many legitimate
ways of escape, but the essential thing is that all
messages to the prisoner from his Araminta outside
should be conveyed in his loaf of bread. To whisper
them in Irish is too easy, too unromantic.
But in any case I am on the side of the prisoner.
I always am.
Geographical Research
The other day I met a man who didn’t know where
Tripoli was. Tripoli happened to come into the
conversation, and he was evidently at a loss.
“Let’s see,” he said. “Tripoli
is just down by the—er—you know.
What’s the name of that place?” “That’s
right,” I answered, “just opposite Thingumabob.
I could show you in a minute on the map. It’s
near—what do they call it?” At this
moment the train stopped, and I got out and went straight
home to look at my atlas.
Of course I really knew exactly where Tripoli was.
About thirty years ago, when I learnt geography, one
of the questions they were always asking me was, “What
are the exports of Spain, and where is Tripoli?”
But much may happen in twenty years; coast erosion
and tidal waves and things like that. I looked
at the map in order to assure myself that Tripoli
had remained pretty firm. As far as I could make
it out it had moved. Certainly it must have looked
different thirty years ago, for I took some little
time to locate it. But no doubt one’s point
of view changes with the decades. To a boy Tripoli
might seem a long way from Italy—even in
Asia Minor; but when he grew up his standards of measurement
would be altered. Tripoli would appear in its
proper place due south of Sicily.
