"Be it so," said Pabo. "And now—find Morwen, aye—and speak with Howel also. Tell him naught of Ogofau. I shall have something to say shortly that will make the hearts of all Welshmen dance."
"And will you not tell me?"
"All in good time, lad. As yet I cannot say, for in sooth it is an expectation and not a certainty."
Then he departed.
Goronwy leaned against the church wall, looking in the direction he had taken, perplexed and not knowing what he should do.
Pabo took his course over the brawling Annell, below the church, and mounted a spur of hill, among woods, till he came to a hollow, an incipient glen that ran west, and opposite rose a rounded height crowned by a camp, the Caer of ancient Cynyr, the father of the Five Saints. It was thence these holy brothers had descended to place themselves under the tuition of Cynwyl. It was when these five had disappeared into the gold-mine that the father had surrendered his principality to the missionary who had come among them from the North, and thus had constituted the Archpriesthood, holding a chieftaindom over the Caio district.
And now Pabo descended among stumps of trees and broken masses of stone, and all at once stood on the edge of a great crater, into which the silvery light of the moon from behind a haze flowed, and which it filled. Out of this circular basin shot up a spire of rock, called the Belfry of Gwen—of her who dared to enter the mine to spy on the Saints in their magic sleep.
Cautiously Pabo descended the steep side, where the rubble, sifted for gold, sloped to the floor.
On reaching the bottom he looked around him.
He was in an amphitheater of rock, here abrupt, there buried under slopes of detritus.