Standing bowed over his shield in the attitude of a suppliant, Komm invoked the name of brother by which he was entitled to call them. They were sons of the same fathers. Wherefore the Britons forbore to slay him. They conducted him in chains to a great village near the coast. Passing down a road bordered by huts of wattle-work, he noticed high flat stones, fixed in the ground at irregular intervals, and covered with signs which he thought to be sacred, for it was not easy to decipher their meaning. He perceived that the huts of this great village, though poorer, were not unlike those of the villages of the Atrebates. In front of the chiefs' dwellings poles were erected from which hung the antlers of deer, the skulls of boars and the fair-haired heads of men. Komm was taken into a hut which contained nothing save a hearthstone still covered with ashes, a bed of dried leaves and the image of a god shapen from the trunk of a lime-tree. Bound to the pillar which supported the thatched roof, the Atrebate meditated on his ill luck and sought in his mind for some magic word of power or some ingenious device which should deliver him from the wrath of the British chieftains. And to beguile his wretchedness, after the manner of his ancestors, he composed a song of menace and complaint, coloured by pictures of his native woods and mountains, the memory of which filled his heart. Women with babes at the breast came and looked at him curiously and questioned him as to his country, his race and his adventures. He answered them kindly. But his soul was sad and wracked by cruel anxiety. [1] The modern Arras.--_Trans._ 2 Detained until the end of summer on the Morini shore, Cæsar set sail one night about the third watch, and by the fourth hour of day had sight of the Island. The Britons awaited him on the beach. But neither their arrows of hard wood nor their scythed chariots, nor their long-haired horses trained to swim in the sea among the shoals, nor their countenances made terrible with paint gave check to the Romans. The Eagle surrounded by legionaries touched the soil of the barbarians' Island. The Britons fled beneath a shower of stone and lead hurled from machines which they believed to be monsters. Struck with terror, they ran like a herd of elks before the spear of the hunter.