His hopes had fallen lower and lower, as, at each fort they visited, he heard the same story--that all prisoners sent up to the mountain fortresses had, in a short time, been put to death.

It was possible, of course, that his father might still be at one of the towns where new levies had been drilled; but he had not, from the first, thought it likely that a merchant sailor would be put to this work; and had it not been that he clung to the belief that there was a prisoner at Savandroog, and that that prisoner was his father, he would have begun to despair.
It was true that there were still many hill forts scattered about the country, unvisited, but there seemed no reason why any of the prisoners should have been allowed to survive in these forts, when they had all been put to death in those they had visited, among which were the places that had been most used as prisons.
"I would give it up," he said to Surajah, "were it not that, in the first place, it would almost break my mother's heart.

Her conviction that my father is still alive has never been shaken.

It has supported her all these years, and I believe that, were I to return and tell her that it was no longer possible to hope, her faith would still be unshaken.

She would still think of him as pining in some dungeon, and would consider that I had given up the search from faint heartedness.
That is my chief reason.