I was dimly aware of a blacker blackness before us, as of a big, tall rock. This we skirted and then stepped out of the brook towards the left. There we stepped into deep drifts of dead leaves.
"Here is bedding," said Agathemer, "such as Ulysses was content with after his long sea-swim to the island of the Phaeacians. Perhaps we can get along in such bedding."
Naked as we were we burrowed into the dead leaves, and, after a bit I felt less chilly, though by no means warm.
Agathemer took from me the cylinder I had been carrying; opened one of the two, a matter of some difficulty, as the top was so tight; sniffed at it, and took from it some morsels of food: a bit of cold ham, a bit of cold fowl and a bit of bread. These I ate, chewing them slowly. At the same time he ate, as slowly, an equal share.
After eating we tried to sleep. I was too weary and drowsy to keep awake, and too cold and too much in pain from the scratch on my shoulder and the gouge on my hip to be able to sleep long. I got some sleep before dawn, but not much.
Fortunately for us the night had been clear, warm and windless. Even so we suffered severely with the cold; since the chilled air, of course, rolled down the hillsides into the hollow along the bed of the brook, till the valley was filled with thick mist and every leaf and twig dripped with moisture. Through the mist the dawn broke pearly gray at first and then iridescent; and, when the first sunrays penetrated the white haze and gilded every leaf-edge, turning the tree-tops to gold and making every waterdrop a diamond, no lovelier morning could be imagined.
The trees about and above us were mostly beeches, with many chestnuts and a few plane-trees and poplars. We were in a clump of willows with thick alders under them, so that, even with no other protection, we could not have been seen from any distance. And we were most excellently protected, being on a little island where the brook forked and flowed, three or four yards wide and nearly a yard deep, round a huge gray rock, fully fifteen yards across and nearly seven yards high, a bulge of worn stone, shaped much like half a melon and almost as symmetrical. And, as one might lay half a melon, curve up, and then split it with one blow of a kitchen- knife, so this great rock, as if cleft by a single sweep of a Titan's sword, was rent in half and the halves left about four yards apart. The fracture was clean and smooth, except that a piece about two yards square had cracked loose at the ground level from the southern half and lay bedded in the mud, its top a foot or so above the earth, leaving in the face of one rock a rectangular niche about a man's length each way, in which cavity two men could shelter from the rain.
As soon as it was light enough to see I was for crawling into this little cavern. But Agathemer restrained me.
"The face of the rock," he said, "would feel cold as ice to your skin. You have, even if you do not realize it, somewhat warmed the leaves next you. For the present we are least uncomfortable where we are. The dawn-wind cannot get at our hides while we are under these leaves. Keep still."
He kept himself as much as possible under the leaves but wriggled nearer the altar-shaped bit of rock. Half-sitting, half crouching by it, little besides his head out of the heap of leaves in which he was, he opened both cylinders and laid out on the top of the stone what food was in them. This he divided into six equal portions, two he put back in each cylinder. We munched interminably, making every morsel last as long as possible.