s," Hermon heard one man near him call to another. "They came
to the fortress as auxiliary troops. Philippus forbade them to plunder
on pain of death, and showed them--the gods be thanked!--that he was
in earnest. Otherwise it would soon look here as though the plagues of
locusts, flood, and fire had visited us at once. Red-haired men are not
the only sons of Typhon!"

And Hermon thought that he had indeed never seen any human beings
equally fierce, bold to the verge of reckless madness, as these Gallic
warriors. The tempest which swept them forward, and the water through
which they waded, only seemed to increase their enjoyment, for sheer
delight rang in their exulting shouts and yells.

Oh, yes! To march amid this uproar of the elements was a pleasure to the
healthy men. It afforded them the rarest, most enlivening delight. For
a long time nothing had so strongly reminded them of the roaring of the
wind and the rushing of the rain in their northern home. It seemed a
delicious relief, after the heat and dryness of the south, which they
had endured with groans.

When they perceived the eyes fixed upon them they swung their weapons,
arched their breasts with conscious vanity, distorted their faces into
terrible threatening grimaces, or raised bugle horns to their lips, drew
from them shrill, ear-piercing notes and gloated, with childish delight,
in the terror of the gaping crowd, on whom the restraint of authority
sternly forbade them to show their mettle.

Lust of rapine and greed for booty glittered in many a fiery, longing
look, but their leaders kept them in check with the sword. So
they rushed on without stopping, like a thunderstorm pregnant with
destruction which the wind drives over a terrified village.

Hermon also had to take the road they followed, and, after giving the
Gauls a long start, he set out again.

But though he succeeded in passing the marshy region without injury,
there had been delay after delay; here the horses had left the flooded
dike road and floundered up to their knees in the morass, there trees
from the roadside, uprooted by the storm, barred the way.

As night closed in the rain ceased and the wind began to subside, but
dark clouds covered the sky, and the horsemen were still an hour's ride
from the place where the road ended at the little harbour from which
travellers entered the boat which conveyed them to Tennis.

The way no longer led through the marsh, but through tilled lands