At its best it was dictatorship, at its worst chaos, and what we saw from one end of the country to the other was the detritus of an experiment whose own people lamented had lasted far too long.

We felt like trophies of war, and at a dozen checkpoints, we could hear militiamen running to the car to administer another beating.

“Dirty dogs,” men shouted out at each stop.

Over the years, all of us had seen men detained, blindfolded and handcuffed at places like Abu Ghraib, or corralled after some operation in Iraq or Afghanistan. Now we were the faceless we had covered perhaps too dispassionately. For the first time, we felt what it was like to be disoriented by a blindfold, to have plastic cuffs dig into your wrists, for hands to go numb.

The act is probably less terrifying than the unknown. You don’t know when it’s going to end or what comes next. By late afternoon, we were taken to a jail in Surt. Our captors led us to a basement cell with a few ratty mattresses, a bottle to urinate in, a jug of water and a bag of dates. As night fell, we wondered whether anyone knew — or could know — where we were.

Graffiti of devout prisoners was etched into the wall, testament to an insurgency that was crushed in eastern Libya in the late 1990s. “God bring us relief,” one line read.

At one point, Anthony was taken out of the cell for questioning. He never saw the captors.

“How could you enter without a visa?” the man asked him. “Don’t you know you could be killed here and no one would ever know?” Anthony nodded. The man went on to denounce the rebels he said they were fighting — Qaeda fanatics, he said, and gangs of armed criminals.

“How could they ever rule Libya?” he asked.

They sent Anthony back to the cell, and we knew that no one had any idea where we were.