"It's the Somme."
"But it's flowing north!"
"Yes, but there's a sharp bend a few miles from here."
"You must have passed a party of men carrying off an old man and a girl bound to two horses."
"Haven't seen anything of that sort," declared the man.
He resumed his singing. Women's voices joined in the chorus; and the boat moved on.
"Rolleston must have branched off towards France," Simon concluded.
"He can't have done that," objected Dolores, "since his present objective is the fountain of gold which some one mentioned to him."
"In that case what has become of them?"
The reply to this question was vouchsafed after an hour's difficult walking over a ground composed of millions upon millions of those broken sea-shells which the patient centuries use in kneading and shaping of the tallest cliffs. It all crackled under their feet and sometimes they sank into it above their ankles. Some tracts, hundreds of yards wide, were covered with a layer of dead fish on which they were compelled to trudge and which formed a mass of decomposing flesh with an intolerable stench to it.