Then, all at once, Ogier del' Peyra laughed.
"What is it, father?" asked Jean, startled.
"It is not a vision. I am not asleep!"
The old man had been oppressed with fear, lest what he went through was a phantasm of the brain, and lest he should wake to the hideous reality of a living entombment. The swash of the cold water over his foot, up his calf, above his knee, was the first thing that roused him to the certainty that he was really free.
Without difficulty and danger the little party crossed the river; they ascended the flanks of the great plateau and passed at once into oak woods. Thence, after a while, they emerged upon a bald track, where there was hardly any soil at all, and the whole region seemed to be struck with perpetual hoar-frost. The hoe, even the foot turned up chalk-flakes. Nothing could grow on so barren a surface.
The moon rose and made the waste look colder, deader than under the starlight.
Suddenly shouts were heard, and at the same moment before the little party rushed an old grey wolf. As he passed he turned to them with a snarl that showed his fangs gleaming as ivory in the moonlight. He did not stop—he fled precipitately; and next moment from out of a dell rushed a troop of men armed with pikes, pitchforks, and cudgels, attended by a legion of farm-dogs yelping vigorously.
The little party drew up. The moon gleamed on the morions and the steel plates sewn on the buff jerkins, and black to westward on the white causse [8] lay the shadows of horses and men.
[ [8] The Causse, from Calx, is the chalk or limestone plateau.
A portion of those pursuing the wolf halted. "Haro! Haro!" shouted one man. "Here are human wolves, the worst of all! Let us kill them before we run the other down."