ugh your helmet-plume--past altars to
Legions and Generals forgotten, and broken statues of Gods and Heroes,
and thousands of graves where the mountain foxes and hares peep at you.
Red-hot in summer, freezing in winter, is that big, purple heather
country of broken stone.

'Just when you think you are at the world's end, you see a smoke from
East to West as far as the eye can turn, and then, under it, also as
far as the eye can stretch, houses and temples, shops and theatres,
barracks and granaries, trickling along like dice behind--always
behind--one long, low, rising and falling, and hiding and showing line
of towers. And that is the Wall!'

'Ah!' said the children, taking breath.

'You may well,' said Parnesius. 'Old men who have followed the Eagles
since boyhood say nothing in the Empire is more wonderful than first
sight of the Wall!'

'Is it just a Wall? Like the one round the kitchen-garden?' said Dan.
'No, no! It is the Wall. Along the top are towers with guard-houses,
small towers, between. Even on the narrowest part of it three men with
shields can walk abreast, from guard-house to guard-house. A little
curtain wall, no higher than a man's neck, runs along the top of the
thick wall, so that from a distance you see the helmets of the sentries
sliding back and forth like beads. Thirty feet high is the Wall, and
on the Picts' side, the North, is a ditch, strewn with blades of old
swords and spear-heads set in wood, and tyres of wheels joined by
chains. The Little People come there to steal iron for their
arrow-heads.

'But the Wall itself is not more wonderful than the town behind it.
Long ago there were great ramparts and ditches on the South side, and
no one was allowed to build there. Now the ramparts are partly pulled
down and built over, from end to end of the Wall; making a thin town
eighty miles long. Think of it! One roaring, rioting, cock-fighting,
wolf-baiting, horse-racing town, from Ituna on the West to Segedunum on
the cold eastern beach! On one side heather, woods and ruins where
Picts hide, and on the other, a vast town--long like a snake, and
wicked like a snake. Yes, a snake basking beside a warm wall!

'My Cohort, I was told, lay at Hunno, where the Great North Road runs
through the Wall into the Province of Valentia.'Parnesius laughed
scornfully. 'The Province of Valentia! We followed the road,
therefore, into Hunno town, and stood astonished. The place was a
fair--a fa