“There is Aornos--see, among the pines up there. ’Tis the second largest town in our Blue Sakae country. With your wonder-glass you will be able to see the houses.” I think of all our belongings, after our rifles, the things that most impressed the Sakae were our field-glasses and the telescope. I checked my pony, and, looking through the glasses at the faint blur that Kyrlos indicated, saw the town, a long stone-walled mass of houses, with a high tower in the centre. It nestled among orchards and terraced fields with many scattered pine woods, on one side of a long hill with wooded top. In three quarters of an hour more we were following a broad road that ran up to the city. There was a lot of traffic on it, big slow-moving bullock-carts piled with household gear, chattering troops of women with babies and little staring children, a few bodies of half-armed men, evidently levies assembling. Kyrlos said these were the people from the frontier villages, many of whom in time of war fled back to safer refuge behind the frontier forts. A quarter of an hour later saw us riding in under the big gate, amid a clatter of arms, as the guard turned out and clashed their spears on the stone paving. It was a fine gate with high stone towers on either side, in the crenellated tops of which one saw the glitter of steel as the sentries paced to and fro. On either side of the gate a long solid wall of grey granite, some forty feet high, slid away to girdle the city, with below it a dry ditch spiked and palisaded. Aornos would be a tough proposition to take without artillery. Above the big gate, with the drawbridge over which we rode, and the massive timber doors nearly a foot thick covered with iron plates, were two great beams like cranes, which, to my joy, I later discovered to be a form of a catapult hurling blocks of stone and nets of smaller stones. We had got back to the Middle Ages, all right. We rode up the main street at a footpace, the people saluting Kyrlos as he passed. The road was broad and clean, paved with irregular-shaped blocks of stone, and guttered on either side, while the buildings, if not exactly mansions, were for the most part of stone, well built, and cleanly kept. They were mostly shops here, with an open storey below and balconies above. At night the lower part was closed by big wooden doors, with iron bars and large clumsy padlocks. But now all were open, and the shopkeepers sat there vending their goods and chaffering with the passers-by. They seemed rather to group by trades. I noticed a series of cloth shops, then several dealers in earthenware, then a few metal shops with copper and brass bowls and iron cooking-utensils displayed. Then a corner devoted to sellers of leather gear, followed by several shops whose stock-in-trade seemed to be rope and hemp stuff of all types.