"Take heed, Julius," replied the Atrebate, "and weigh your words. The moon that you here behold fleeing through the clouds is not the moon which at Rome shines on your marble temples. Though she be big and bright, this moon could not be seen in Italy. The distance is too great." 3 Winter came and covered Gaul with darkness, with ice and with snow. The hearts of the warriors in their wattle huts were moved as they thought on the chiefs and their retainers whom Cæsar had slain or sold by auction. Sometimes to the door of the hut came à man begging bread and showing his wrists with the hands cut off by a lictor. And the warriors' hearts revolted. Words of wrath passed from mouth to mouth. They assembled by night in the depths of the woods and the hollows of the rocks. Meanwhile King Komm with his faithful followers hunted in the forests, in the land of the Atrebates. Every day, a messenger in a striped mantle and red braces came by secret paths to the King, and, slackening the speed of his horse as he drew near to him, said in a low voice: "Komm, will you not be a free man in a free country? Komm, will you any longer submit to be a slave of the Romans?" Then the messenger disappeared along the narrow path, where the fallen leaves deadened the sound of his galloping horse. Komm, King of the Atrebates, remained the Romans' friend. But gradually he persuaded himself that it behooved the Atrebates and the Morini to be free, since he was their King. It annoyed him to see Romans, settled at Nemetacum, sitting in tribunals, where they dispensed justice, and geometricians from Italy planning roads through the sacred forests. And then he admired the Romans less since he had seen their ships broken against the British cliffs and their legionaries weeping by night on the beach. He continued to exercise sovereignty in Cæsar's name. But to his followers he darkly hinted at the approach of war. Three years later the hour had struck: Roman blood had flowed in Genabum. The chieftains allied against Cæsar assembled their fighting men in the Arverni Hills. Komm did not love these chiefs. Rather did he hate them, some because they were richer than he in men, in horses and in lands; others because of the profusion of the gold and the rubies which they possessed; others, again, because they said that they were braver than he and of nobler race. Nevertheless he received their messengers, to whom he gave an oak-leaf and a hazel twig as a sign of affection. And he corresponded with the chiefs who were hostile to Cæsar by means of twigs cut and knotted in such a manner as to be unintelligible save to the Gauls, who knew the language of leaves. He uttered no war-cry. But he went to and fro among the villages of the Atrebates, and, visiting the warriors in their huts, to them he said: "Three things were the first to be born: man, liberty, light."