ad, it was no longer only one house, one village, one hamlet, one
town in that long succession of valleys at their feet that was
disappearing in billows of black smoke, streaked with red gleams. It was
all the houses, all the villages, all the hamlets, all the towns in the
laps of all those valleys, that the conflagration was devouring. From
North to South, from East to West, all was afire. The rivers themselves
seemed to roll in flame under their grain and forage-laden barges, which
in turn took fire, and sank in the waters.

The heavens were alternately obscured by immense clouds of smoke, or
reddened with innumerable columns of fire. From one end to the other,
the panorama was soon nothing but a furnace, an ocean of flame.

Nor were the houses, hamlets, and towns of only these valleys given over
to the flames. It was the same in all the regions which Albinik and
Meroe had traversed in one night and day of travel, on their way from
Vannes to the mouth of the Loire, where was pitched the camp of
Caesar.[1]

All this territory had been burned by its inhabitants, and they
abandoned the smoking ruins to join the Gallic army, assembled in the
environs of Vannes. Thus the voice of the Chief of the Hundred Valleys
had been obeyed--the command repeated from place to place, from village
to village, from city to city:

"In three nights, at the hour when the moon, the sacred orb of Gaul
shall rise, let all the countryside, from Vannes to the Loire, be set on
fire. Let Caesar and his army find in their passage neither men nor
houses, nor provisions, nor forage, but everywhere, everywhere cinders,
famine, desolation, and death."

It was done as the druids and the Chief of the Hundred Valleys had
ordered.[2]

The two travelers, who witnessed this heroic devotion of each and all to
the safety of the fatherland, had thus seen a sight no one had ever seen
in the past; a sight which perhaps none will ever see in the future.

Thus were expiated those fatal dissensions, those rivalries between
province and province, which for too long a time, and to the triumph of
their enemies, had divided the people of Gaul.

CHAPTER II.

IN THE LION'S DEN.

The night passed. When the next day drew to its close Albinik and Meroe
had traversed all the burnt country, from Vannes to the mouth of the
Loire, which they were now approaching. At sunset they came to a fork in
the road.

"Of these two ways, which shall we take?" mused Albi