"Keep still! Lie still! Don't move or speak! Lie still!"
He spoke in a tense whisper, so low that I could hardly understand him with his mouth against my ear, so full of terror that the tone of it startled me wide awake.
My first impression was of a glaring orange light on the roof of the cavern and a diffused reflection of it or from it on the roof of our gallery-alcove.
"Keep your head down!" Agathemer whispered. "If you turn over, turn over quietly."
I did turn over, very slowly, a muscle at a time and with great precautions to avoid rustling the leaves or twigs of the bed on which we lay.
As soon as I turned over I perceived that a good, big fire must be burning on the fire-place and that the light on the cavern roof was the direct glare from that, while the subdued glow on the roof of our alcove was the light reflected from the farther wall of the cavern or from its roof.
As our alcove was separated from the fire by a jutting pillar of rock, no direct light from the fire fell on its opening; it and we were well in the shadow. So shadowed we could hunch ourselves forward as far as we dared and peer down into the cave.
Its floor was littered with wallets, blankets, staffs and other foot- farers' gear. About it sat groups of men, every one with a sheath-knife or dagger in his belt. I counted forty and there were more out of sight round the shoulder of rock between our alcove and the fire-place.
We smelt flesh roasting or boiling. The squatting groups seemed busy with preparations for a meal.
The men, except one lad like a shepherd, did not look Italian. Some struck me as Spanish, others as Gallic, one or two as runaway slaves of mongrel ancestry. Nearly all of them had the unmistakable carriage and bearing of soldiers, even specifically of soldiers of out-of-the-way garrisons, in the mountains or on frontiers. Yet their behavior was tin-soldierly. I judged them discharged campaigners with an admixture of deserters and outlaws. They all had travellers' umbrella hats, and all had thrown them off; their cloaks were coarse and rough, many torn, but none patched, their tunics similar; their boots of Gallic fashion, coming up nearly to the knee, like Sicilian hunting-boots. They were all black-haired and shock-headed, all swarthy, and most of them of medium height and solidly built. They did not talk loud and they all talked at once, so that we made out little of what was said and nothing informing.