Then he told me that we had barely missed coming face to face with
Gratillus himself.
This barely missed encounter with one of the most dreaded of the Emperor's
spies, a man who knew me perfectly and who had always disliked me, so
terrified both of us that we left Placentia by the Nuran Gate and made our
way southwestward into the Apennines.
Once in the mountains we avoided every good road we saw and kept to bad
byways, until we were completely lost.
CHAPTER XVI
THE CAVE
The late spring or early summer weather was hot and clear. We had been
pressing on feverishly and were heated, tired and sleepy, when, while
following a faint track through dense woods, we took a wrong turn and soon
found that we had utterly lost our way. The sunlight was intensely
brilliant and the windless air sweltering. Stumbling over rocks and
through bushes was exhausting. We came upon a little spring and quenched
our thirst. Standing by it and staring about we noticed what looked like
an opening in an inconspicuous vine-clad cliff. It was, in fact, the
entrance to a spacious and, apparently, extensive cave.
The outer opening was about the size of an ordinary door. Though it was
well masked by beeches above and cornel bushes below, such was the
position of the sun and so intense was the flood of light it poured down
from the cloudless sky, that the inside of the cave, for some little
distance, was faintly discernible in the glimmer which penetrated there.
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