The moon had risen radiant among the stars. She flooded space with so brilliant a light that Albinik and his wife could see as in full day, and as far as the most distant horizon, the country that stretched at their feet.
Suddenly, a light cloud of smoke, at first whitish, then black, presently colored with the red tints of a kindling fire, rose above one of the hamlets scattered in the plain.
"Hesus! Hesus!" exclaimed Meroë. Then, hiding her face in the bosom of her husband who was kneeling near her, "You spoke truly. The sacred orb of Gaul has given the signal for the sacrifice. It is fulfilled."
"Oh, liberty!" cried Albinik, "Holy liberty!—--"
He could not finish. His voice was smothered in tears, and he drew his weeping wife close in his arms.
Meroë did not leave her face hidden in her husband's breast any longer than it would take a mother to kiss the forehead, mouth, and eyes, of her new born babe, but when she again raised her head and dared to look abroad, it was no longer only one house, one village, one hamlet, one town in that long succession of valleys at their feet that was disappearing in billows of black smoke, streaked with red gleams. It was all the houses, all the villages, all the hamlets, all the towns in the laps of all those valleys, that the conflagration was devouring. From North to South, from East to West, all was afire. The rivers themselves seemed to roll in flame under their grain and forage-laden barges, which in turn took fire, and sank in the waters.
The heavens were alternately obscured by immense clouds of smoke, or reddened with innumerable columns of fire. From one end to the other, the panorama was soon nothing but a furnace, an ocean of flame.
Nor were the houses, hamlets, and towns of only these valleys given over to the flames. It was the same in all the regions which Albinik and Meroë had traversed in one night and day of travel, on their way from Vannes to the mouth of the Loire, where was pitched the camp of Caesar.[1]
All this territory had been burned by its inhabitants, and they abandoned the smoking ruins to join the Gallic army, assembled in the environs of Vannes. Thus the voice of the Chief of the Hundred Valleys had been obeyed—the command repeated from place to place, from village to village, from city to city:
"In three nights, at the hour when the moon, the sacred orb of Gaul shall rise, let all the countryside, from Vannes to the Loire, be set on fire. Let Caesar and his army find in their passage neither men nor houses, nor provisions, nor forage, but everywhere, everywhere cinders, famine, desolation, and death."