t on their
three days' journey, Wardo was taken aside by strangers, who talked
earnestly. "The state of the country," he told his men, with his tongue
in his cheek. Most of these strangers were fair-skinned Saxons, like
himself; indeed, the number of these was significant. Wardo, coming from
the south, had to tell what he knew of recent happenings there. This was
not much; his interlocutors, it would seem, knew more than he.
Especially did they inquire to whom he belonged, and what he was doing
with his charges.

They crossed the Sabrina in a flat-bottomed barge, and were in Britannia
Secunda, the ancient country of the Silures. Here, from Uriconium to
Glevum on the Sabrina, and south to Leucarum on the Via Julia, were
scattered the iron mines from which their owners drew inexhaustible
wealth. The one controlled by Eudemius lay five Roman miles west of the
river, and was reckoned one of the largest and richest in the section.
In it were said to be employed over five hundred men, mostly prisoners
from the various estates of Eudemius, and overseers.

VII

The gallery, pitch-black and narrow, was dotted with moving lights which
wandered here and there, each a restless will-o'-the-wisp. It was very
damp, and from somewhere came a monotonous drip of water. The tapping of
picks sounded incessantly out of the darkness, and occasionally there
were hoarse voices raised in wanton curses or harsh commands. Shores of
heavy timbers supported the sides and roof of the tunnel, looming
grotesquely gigantic as some passing light touched them; this was the
newest of the workings, and so far the richest.

A light and a clanking of chains drew near down the tunnel; and eight
men, chained like mules, and loaded with baskets of ore, came painfully
over the uneven ground to the chamber of the main shaft, where a second
gang waited to unload them. Each party was in charge of its own
overseer, who carried a whip and went armed to the teeth. It was easier
to use men than to lower animals into the galleries for the work;
besides, the superintendent wished to save his horses.

The shaft, through which men ascended and descended by means of long
series of ladders, opened out into a chamber, roughly circular in
shape, from which the galleries branched off in all directions. It ran
through four different levels, the top one, and the oldest, something
over fifteen feet underground, the lowest not quite seventy. On each
level the ore was handle