I slept in the mummy case that night and Dutchy in the first sleeping bag. It must have been about midnight when I was awakened by a most unearthly yell. It sent the cold chills running up and down my back. A second scream brought me into action, and I struggled to throw back the head flap, which had become caught. It seemed an age before I could open it and wriggle out of the bag. Dutchy was sitting up in bed with a look of horror on his face, and his whole body was in a tremor of fear. One of the men dashed a glass of water in his face, which brought him back to his senses.

Fig. 212. Umbrella with Fly.

It was only a nightmare, we found. Dutchy dreamed he had been injured in a railway accident and had been taken for dead to the morgue. He tried to let them know that he was alive, but couldn't utter a sound, until finally he burst out with the yells that roused the camp. Then, as he awoke with the horror of the dream still on him, his eyes fell on the two stretcher beds that looked like biers and the black coffin-like sleeping bag. It was not much wonder that Dutchy was frightened. The camp did certainly have a most ghastly appearance in the vague moonlight that filtered through the trees, and it must have been still more gruesome to see the coffin and biers suddenly burst open and the corpses come running toward him. To prevent any further nightmare we set Dutchy's sleeping bag under the "A" tent, where he would be saved the horror of again waking up in a morgue.