For awhile our course, bending roughly parallel with the Golo, led us almost due east, and at length brought us out upon the flat shore of the Tuscan Sea. Here the mountains, which had confined us to the river valley, run northward with a sharp twist, and turning with them we rode once more with our faces set toward our destination, keeping the tall range on our left hand, and on our right the melancholy sea-marshes where men cannot dwell for the malaria, and where for hour after hour we rode in a silence unbroken save by the plash of fish in the lagoon, or the cry of a heron solitary among the reeds. This desolation lasted all the way to Biguglia, where we turned aside again among the foothills to avoid the fortress of Bastia and the traffic of the roads about it. Beyond Bastia we were safe in the fastnesses of Cape Corso, across which, from this eastern shore to the western, and to the camp at Olmeta, one only pass (so Marc'antonio informed me) was practicable. I guessed we were nearing it when he began to mutter to himself in the intervals of scanning the crags high on our left; for this was to him, he confessed, an almost unknown country. But the gap, when we came abreast of it, could scarcely be mistaken. With a glance around, as though to take our bearings, he abruptly headed off for it, and, having climbed the first slope, reined up and sat for a moment, rigid in his saddle as a statue, listening.
The sun had sunk behind the range, and the herbage at our feet lay in a bronze shadow; but light still bathed the sea behind us, and over it a company of gulls kept flashing and wheeling and clamouring. While I listened, following Marc'antonio's example, it seemed to me that an echo from the summit directly above us took up the gull's cry and repeated it, prolonging the note. Marc'antonio lifted and waved a hand.
"That will be Stephanu," he announced; and sure enough, before we had pushed a couple of furlongs up the slope, we caught sight of Stephanu descending a steep scree to meet us.
He and Marc'antonio nodded salutation brusquely, as though they had parted but a few hours ago. Marc'antonio, though relieved to see him, wore a judicial frown.
"What of the Princess, O Stephanu?" he demanded.
"The Princess is well enough, for aught I know," answered Stephanu, with a glance at me.
"You can speak before the cavalier. He knows not everything until we tell him; but he is one of us, and that I will engage."
Stephanu shrugged his shoulders. "The Princess is well enough, for aught I know," he repeated.
"But what fool's talk is this? The Prince packed you off, meaning mischief of some kind—what mischief you, being on the spot, should have been able to guess."
"It is God's truth, then, that I could not," Stephanu admitted sullenly; "and what is more, neither could you in my place have made a guess—no, not with all your wisdom."