“Hum,” said the old man thoughtfully. He was thinking that this must be a strong and valiant people, and that if they increased in the valley of the yellow river they might become very powerful. “And what are their priests?”
“They have no priesthood dwelling in the temples,” said Toto. “Their elders are their priests and pretend to no magical powers. They are chosen for their wisdom. Their gods are invisible.”
“Hum,” said Mastarna again.
The people to whom he and Toto belonged were called at one time and another Tuscans or Etruscans by others, but they called themselves the Ras, or Rasennae. They had some towns in the mountains beyond the plain where these strangers were. They held most of the country on their side of the rivers, as far north as the river Arno, and they had always lived there, so far as they knew themselves or any one else could say. They were different in almost every way from these strangers of the hills. He wondered [pg 187]if his people had anything whatever that the strangers wanted.
“You say that they build walls,” he said to Toto. “Do they build good ones?”
Toto grinned. He was nothing of a builder himself, but even he could see the difference between the rude stone laying and fencing of the strangers, and the scientific, massive masonry and arched drains of his own country. “They will find out how good they are,” he said, “after twenty years of flood and drought.”
In fact, the worst enemy the colonists had met thus far was water. They were used to mountain slopes with good drainage. They knew how to keep a field from being gutted by mountain freshets, and how to repair roadways and build drains that would carry off the water. They were strong and clever at fitting stones into the right place for walls, and they could dam up a stream for a fishpool or a bathing place. But this sort of country was all new to them. It was not exactly a marsh and not so swampy as it became in later centuries, but at any time it might become a marsh full of ponds and stagnant streams, and remain so for weeks at a time. This was bad for the grain and worse for sheep, and unhealthy for human beings. During the next rainy season after Toto’s visit, the farmers [pg 188]had a very unhappy time. They discovered that too much water is almost if not quite as much a nuisance as too little. In a dry time it is sometimes possible to carry water from a distance, but in a wet time there is nowhere to put the water that is not wanted, and many of their ditches were choked up with débris, and their grain was washed away.
Mastarna was full of patience. He let them toil and soak and chill and sweat until he thought they would welcome a suggestion from almost any quarter. Then he and a man he knew, a stone worker called Canial, took a boat and went across the river to a point where three or four of the colonists were prying an unhappy ox out of the mire. The strength, determination and skill with which they conducted the work were worthy of all admiration. But it would have been far better if the land could have been drained and protected by a solid dyke.
Canial looked the bank over with a shrewd, experienced eye, and said that if he had the work to do, he would dig a ditch there, and there, and there; here he would build a covered drain lined with tilework; and in a certain hollow under the hill he would have an arched waterway, so that flood water would run through instead of tearing at the foundation of the terrace below the vine[pg 189]yards. But he saw no signs that these men in their building made any use of arches. He jumped ashore and splashed through the pools, which were almost waist-deep in some places, up to where the ox was standing panting, wild-eyed and nearly exhausted with fright and struggle. Canial squatted down by a rivulet. He did not know the language of the colonists and they did not know his, but no words were needed for what he wanted to explain. He made a miniature drain rudely arched over with mud-plastered stones while they stood there watching. That could be done, as well with, a six-inch brook as with a river. It did not take the Romans ten minutes to see that he knew more about such matters than they did.
“Caius,” said Colonus to young Cossus, “go over to the camp and find Ruffo, and ask him to come and talk to this fellow.”