His eyes passed on from them and swept
further and further, but still to the very horizon, which quivered
with movement, there was no end to this monstrous cavalry. Already the
vanguard was far past the island of rock upon which he dwelt, and he
could now understand that in front of this vanguard were single scouts
who guided the course of the army, and that it was one of these whom he
had seen the evening before.

All day, held spell-bound by this wonderful sight, the hermit crouched
in the shadow of the rocks, and all day the sea of horsemen rolled
onward over the plain beneath. Simon had seen the swarming quays of
Alexandria, he had watched the mob which blocked the hippodrome of
Constantinople, yet never had he imagined such a multitude as now
defiled beneath his eyes, coming from that eastern skyline which had
been the end of his world. Sometimes the dense streams of horsemen
were broken by droves of brood-mares and foals, driven along by mounted
guards; sometimes there were herds of cattle; sometimes there were lines
of waggons with skin canopies above them; but then once more, after
every break, came the horsemen, the horsemen, the hundreds and the
thousands and the tens of thousands, slowly, ceaselessly, silently
drifting from the east to the west. The long day passed, the light
waned, and the shadows fell; but still the great broad stream was
flowing by.

But the night brought a new and even stranger sight. Simon had marked
bundles of faggots upon the backs of many of the led horses, and now he
saw their use. All over the great plain, red pin-points gleamed through
the darkness, which grew and brightened into flickering columns of
flame. So far as he could see both to east and west the fires extended,
until they were but points of light in the furthest distance. White
stars shone in the vast heavens above, red ones in the great plain
below. And from every side rose the low, confused murmur of voices, with
the lowing of oxen and the neighing of horses.

Simon had been a soldier and a man of affairs before ever he forsook the
world, and the meaning of all that he had seen was clear to him. History
told him how the Roman world had ever been assailed by fresh swarms of
Barbarians, coming from the outer darkness, and that the Eastern Empire
had already, in its fifty years of existence since Constantine had moved
the capital of the world to the shores of the Bosphorus, been tormented
in the same way. Gepidae and H