Kalin advanced and bowed, a courtly and sweeping genuflection.
"Thou dost Sardanes honor, lady, and all the valley is the brighter for thy beauty," he murmured.
Then Kalin fetched forth a packet of manuscripts, well written in Greek characters on parchments that were yellowed and crinkly with extreme age.
"Here be the records of a nation," he said, and set to work to sort them over.
CHAPTER XII
WAR AND AN ARMISTICE
From many an ancient parchment Kalin read to them bits of the lore of the Sardanians, and a strange store of knowledge and incident did the yellowed, leathery scraps unfold. For, as might be judged, the Sardanians had come down from Antiquity; and, as might be guessed, they were an offshoot of old Greece—the Greece that Homer sang.
"Some great city had been sacked," explained the priest, "and from its siege one adventurous party of warriors, with some of their women, turned their faces from their home across the Aegean Seas to the Pillars of Hercules even"—which means that they sailed through the Mediterranean to the Straits of Gibraltar—"and passed the pillars to the great seas beyond. There they sail north, seeking the barbarous isles, where strange metals and red-haired slaves might be gathered"—Britain.
"From the isles they turned southward toward home again, but a great tempest took their ship and whirled it away from the coasts. Down past the Pillars of Hercules the storm drove them, along the coasts of Libya"—Africa. "For weeks were they buffeted in a mighty gale, whirled ever to the south into the gates of the ice gods. Nearly perishing in the cold and for lack of food, on a day a mighty wave came from the north and their ship rode the crest of it through the barriers of ice, and came to this place.