"All this is most ingenious. But there is in this plan one flaw which no one has noted. I suppose that you, Maternus, evolved this really promising idea from pondering on what Claudius told us. All the hearsay about Rome and its festivals which ever came to the ears of all of us put together is as nothing at all compared with what Claudius told us in two months. Claudius had lived in Rome, Claudius knew every alley in Rome. With Claudius to pilot us we might have hoped to succeed. But Claudius is dead, dead somewhere in the Alps, where he is no use to us. He had seen the Emperor, he knew him by sight. Not one of us does. And, as Claudius told us, at the Festival of Cybele, as at several other religious festivals, the Emperor does not wear his official robes, so that anyone may recognize him, but appears in the garb of a priest of the deity celebrated, as High Priest or Assistant High Priest, or as a dignitary of some other degree, the rank in the hierarchy varying with the deity worshipped. "Now not one of us, who have never set eyes on him, can tell Commodus, in the garb of a priest of Cybele, from any other priest of Cybele. We have no reasonable assurance of recognizing the mark at which we aim. Thus we have only a small chance of success, by sunlight or torchlight." This utterance started another wrangle; the men, apparently, about equally divided as backers of Maternus and of Torix. As I lay listening to this hubbub someone stepped on the calf of my leg, his foot slipped off of it, and he fell on top of me, with a smothered exclamation. "Who are you?" he demanded, adding some words which I did not catch. It seemed that another man was occupied similarly with Agathemer. The man who had fallen on me, in the act of scrambling up, yelled out: "Here are two men lying and listening and they do not seem to belong to us. They do not respond to the pass-word." At that every voice stilled and every face turned to our alcove-balcony where our captors, now four, gripped us and had lifted us to our knees. "Throw 'em down!" came a chorus of voices, "throw 'em down!" Down we were thrown, none too tenderly, but we landed without breaking any bones. Two men clutched each of us and haled us towards the fire. There we had our first glimpse of Maternus, who sat on a pack, his back against the rock, not too close to the fire, the light of which played on his left cheek. He looked plump and lazy. "Strip them," he commanded. As he was being obeyed somebody did something to the fire which increased the light it gave. "Turn them round," Maternus commanded. "Humph," he commented, "by their faces they are a Roman gentleman and his Greek secretary; by their backs they are fugitive slaves with bad records." "They are both branded," added Torix, who had been inspecting us. "Where?" queried Maternus. "I don't see any brand marks." "On the left shoulder, each of them," Torix replied.