We wriggled into the tunnel side by side, until our heads were well under the mattress-roof. We could see out under the huddled, crumpled canvas. Full in our limited view lay, in the middle of the camp street, a fat Nucerian, the outline of his big chest and prominent paunch dimly visible in the increasing light. His gurgling snores were plainly audible.
Agathemer broke off two fragments of the bread and we munched ruminatively.
We had hardly swallowed three mouthfuls when Agathemer exclaimed:
"Just in time! I can hear the arrows already! Listen!"
We listened. I could hear a sound as of hail on roofs. And, just above us, I could hear the arrows plunge into our protecting mound with a swishing, rending thud.
"We ought to be safe," Agathemer whispered. "But we may get skewered even as we are. Volleyed arrows drive deep."
I heard many a volley and, after the first, since I was listening for it, I heard faintly before each volley the deep boom of thousands of powerful bows, twanging all at the same instant.
As the light increased I could see the drunken Nucerian with his hummocky outline emphasized by five feathered arrows planted in his body. He must have been killed by any of the five.
When we saw living men pass across our outlook, their legs looked like those of some sort of foreign auxiliaries. I made the conjecture, from their movements, that they were killing the merely wounded. Certainly, one of them drove his long sword through the prostrate, arrow-skewered Nucerian; and, sometime later, another, with quite a different type of leg-coverings, did the like.
After daylight we saw pass by the legs of many Praetorian infantrymen and of some cavalrymen. From the second hour we saw only legs of some novel sort of regular soldiery whose trappings neither of us could recognize.