w is of a
soil resembling a light clay, so loose as easily to break into powder,
and is not firm enough to bear any one that treads upon it, and if you
touch it in the least, it flies about like ashes or unslaked lime. In
any danger of war, these people enter their caves, and carrying in their
booty and prey along with them, stay quietly within, secure from every
attack. And when Sertorius, leaving Metellus some distance off,
had placed his camp near this hill, they slighted and despised him,
imagining that he retired into these parts to escape being overthrown
by the Romans. And whether out of anger and resentment, or out of
his unwillingness to be thought to fly from his enemies, early in the
morning he rode up to view the situation of the place. But finding there
was no way to come at it, as he rode about, threatening them in vain and
disconcerted, he took notice that the wind raised the dust and carried
it up towards the caves of the Characitanians, and the northerly wind,
which some call Caecias, prevailing most in those parts, coming up out
of moist plains or mountains covered with snow, at this particular
time, in the heat of summer, being further supplied and increased by
the melting of the ice in the northern regions, blew a delightful, fresh
gale, cooling and refreshing the Characitanians and their cattle all the
day long. Sertorius, considering well all circumstances in which either
the information of the inhabitants, or his own experience had instructed
him, commanded his soldiers to shovel up a great quantity of this light,
dusty earth, to heap it together, and make a mound of it over against
the hill in which these barbarous people lived, who, imagining that all
this preparation was for raising a mound to get at them, only mocked
and laughed at it. However, he continued the work till the evening, and
brought his soldiers back into their camp. The next morning a gentle
breeze at first arose, and moved the lightest parts of the earth, and
dispersed it about as the chaff before the wind; but when the sun got
higher, and the strong, northerly wind had covered the hills with the
dust, the soldiers came and turned this mound of earth over and over,
and broke the hard clods in pieces, whilst others on horseback rode
through it backward and forward, and raised a cloud of dust into the
air; then with the wind the whole of it was carried away and blown into
the dwellings of the Characitanians, all lying open to the no