he dense streams of horsemen were
broken by droves of brood-mares and foals, driven along by mounted
guards; sometimes there were herds of cattle; sometimes there were lines
of waggons with skin canopies above them; but then once more, after
every break, came the horsemen, the horsemen, the hundreds and the
thousands and the tens of thousands, slowly, ceaselessly, silently
drifting from the east to the west. The long day passed, the light
waned, and the shadows fell, but still the great broad stream was
flowing by.

But the night brought a new and even stranger sight. Simon had marked
bundles of faggots upon the backs of many of the led horses, and now he
saw their use. All over the great plain, red pin-points gleamed through
the darkness, which grew and brightened into flickering columns of
flame. So far as he could see both to east and west the fires extended,
until they were but points of light in the furthest distance. White
stars shone in the vast heavens above, red ones in the great plain
below. And from every side rose the low, confused murmur of voices, with
the lowing of oxen and the neighing of horses.

Simon had been a soldier and a man of affairs before ever he forsook the
world, and the meaning of all that he had seen was clear to him. History
told him how the Roman world had ever been assailed by fresh swarms of
Barbarians, coming from the outer darkness, and that the eastern Empire
had already, in its fifty years of existence since Constantine had moved
the capital of the world to the shores of the Bosphorus, been tormented
in the same way. Gepidae and Heruli, Ostrogoths and Sarmatians, he was
familiar with them all. What the advanced sentinel of Europe had seen
from this lonely outlying hill, was a fresh swarm breaking in upon the
Empire, distinguished only from the others by its enormous, incredible
size and by the strange aspect of the warriors who composed it. He alone
of all civilised men knew of the approach of this dreadful shadow,
sweeping like a heavy storm cloud from the unknown depths of the east.
He thought of the little Roman posts along the Dniester, of the ruined
Dacian wall of Trajan behind them, and then of the scattered,
defenceless villages which lay with no thought of danger over all the
open country which stretched down to the Danube. Could he but give them
the alarm! Was it not, perhaps, for that very end that God had guided
him to the wilderness?

Then suddenly he remembered his