James and John had been kidnapped in Idlib province on 22 November 2012, during their last scheduled hours in Syria, where they had been for several weeks. They had been heading towards the Turkish border, when they stopped at an Internet café that they had used before. It was Thanksgiving and James chatted with friends in the United States, while sending off articles and photos.

As they were driving the last stretch towards the border, they were stopped by armed men and driven away.

While the US authorities and Arthur were still looking for James and trying to get information about him from the Syrian regime and other sources, he had been with Daniel and the others the whole time – now in a basement in Sheikh Najjar under ISIS control.

Despite the fact that James had been a hostage for nearly a year, he was spontaneous and easy to be around. He organized equal distribution of the food, of which there was never enough, and gave the impression that he was trying to survive by creating a good atmosphere. James had a strong sense of justice, willingly leading the way and taking it upon himself to ask the guards for more food.

‘By the way, it’s my fortieth birthday today,’ he remarked late at night on 18 October.

‘Congratulations,’ said Daniel. ‘I really hope that your birthday next year will be better.’

The atmosphere in the cell was lifted with James’s arrival, which gave Daniel renewed energy and confidence. He resumed his exercise routine and persuaded the others to do some too.

‘Put your forehead against the floor, not the top of your head.’

Daniel was trying to teach James to stand on his head. To no avail.

‘Ouch, my neck,’ winced James and sat back down.

Each morning from 8 to 10 Daniel did gymnastics with his fellow prisoners. On Mondays it was beginners or the older prisoners, on Wednesdays the youngsters, and on Fridays it was open to all. The number of participants varied, but most of them were keen to stay in shape.

James began his lessons on a Monday and when Daniel tried to cajole him to join in the following Friday, he shrank back into a corner.

‘I think I’ll skip it today,’ said James.

‘Come on now, be a man,’ laughed Daniel.

‘OK, I’ll give it a go.’

When Daniel held his gymnastics lessons, the others provided their blankets, laying them folded on the floor, so that they could turn somersaults on their skinny backs without it sounding like a bunch of bones sliding over the concrete.

After a large chunk of bread and four olives, James came forwards and the others sat along the wall, cheering wildly.

‘OK – I’m ready,’ he said, encouraged by his fellow prisoners.

Daniel was euphoric. He was used to seeing himself as the weak idiot in the corner – the one who hated himself because he had been ‘fucking kidnapped’ and starved into an emaciated prisoner, who couldn’t think of anything else than food and shitting in a bucket. Now he was contributing to the community with somersaults and balance exercises in ways that would strengthen their bodies and minds, and the other hostages applauded when someone mastered a move. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, Steven taught yoga. Sundays they kept free.

It was pitch black in the cell in the evenings, because the electricity cut out. They lay freezing and huddled together under their blankets. One day James asked Daniel if he would teach him how to do massage. He knew that Daniel had learned some techniques from his gymnastics, when he and his teammates eased each other’s sore muscles.

Under cover of darkness at night, so the guards wouldn’t see, they began the lessons. Daniel told James about the body’s various fixed points, about how he should use the thumb or the elbow and how to do a scalp massage.

‘You’re too careful. I can’t feel it,’ said Daniel when James practised on him, but he still enjoyed the rare sense of being touched; for once, it wasn’t a beating from a whip or a cane.

Even though James couldn’t quite figure out how to do a massage, his gentle hands allowed Daniel to relax in a way he hadn’t done since he had first been captured. They often talked quietly together during these times. James spoke about his experiences as a journalist in Afghanistan and his kidnapping in Libya, when he was imprisoned for forty days by Muammar Gaddafi’s forces during the Libyan Civil War in 2011.

They also talked about women. James said that he had always felt clumsy with the opposite sex.

‘Women,’ Daniel said as he massaged James’s muscles, ‘they also like a good strong massage.’

James broke out in infectious laughter.

Can You See the Moon, Daniel?

During the day, when light reached the cell, the hostages tried to find creative ways of passing the time. Daniel got an idea from a white cardboard box which had contained dates and which the guards had left in a corner of the cell.

‘Are you interested in making a game of Risk?’ he asked.

The others thought it sounded like fun and Daniel began collecting material for the game. The side of the cardboard box measured approximately 16 by 24 inches, and on this they drew the world map from the Risk game, purely from memory.

When Daniel ate olives, he spat the pits into a metal tub, filled a bucket with water and scrubbed them clean. He then used a nail to scrape the fruit flesh off the pits and laid them out to dry on the wall that separated the room from the toilet. The others also gave him their date and olive pits, which he cleaned and categorized. The stones could be dark, light, large or small. A small olive pit symbolized a soldier, a large olive pit a horse, while a date pit symbolized a cannon with ten soldiers.

Daniel had saved a small yoghurt tub, which he used to construct a die. He pricked a circle in the bottom with a nail, then divided the circle into six equal parts and gave each section a number from one to six. When an olive stone was thrown into the tub, it landed on the number of dots that the player should move his piece.

They made mission cards and tore paper into strips to use as pieces. When everything was completed, Risk became a popular alternative to chess, the only game in the cell until then. Daniel had become a complete chess nerd and found a mental escape from his captivity by immersing himself in looking for gaps in his opponent’s defence. There were a lot of them on James’s half of the board, on the rare occasions when Daniel persuaded him to play.

The new game also helped him forget where he was, and between four and six of them would often play together. Daniel feared that the guards would mistake the Risk board for an escape plan, so they would sit in his corner with their backs to the door and play at conquering countries and territories around the world, ready to cover the pieces with a blanket if the guards should come in.

An independent judge would be appointed for each new round, although debates would quickly arise about how independent he was when he had to adjudicate how far a player could move if the olive pit lay on the dividing line between two numbers. The players would form alliances, which led to cynical power struggles and predictable intrigues. They took defeat so personally and seriously that they would fall out over it.

‘I quit!’ one of them would say suddenly. ‘I don’t want to play any more.’

‘Come on now, it’s just a game,’ someone would say. It was as if it had become impossible to play for fun, because the fear of death, the longing and the pain, was all being channelled into a board game made of cardboard and olive pits.

Daniel stopped playing and thought back to his first shocking days in captivity, when he had imagined that it would be a matter of hours, days or weeks before he would be free again. Back then, it never crossed his mind to think in terms of months, and now six months had already gone by. Perhaps he would have to add ‘number of years’ to his internal accounting of his time as a hostage.