Roland of the Breton March, riding at the head of his command far down the road and well past the bend, had heard the first cries of distress and the first turmoil. He had thought that some blunderer had lost his wagon down the steep, or that the column had received one of those checks which, in marching down a narrow way, bad management will give. He was for riding back at first when, at a place where a level of grass breaks the rocky steep and leads away up from the road to the left, to the heights above it, he saw issuing out from the woods before him the press of the mountaineers. With him was his guard and certain of his peers. Before the shock came upon him he had looked down into the road, which he could well survey from such a place, and he saw in a moment what had come. He saw the summer sky of the afternoon, blue but misty above them, and the deep forest which had been so silent all about, and he saw, high in heaven, between the peaks, one great bird and then another, slowly circling upon black wings. And he saw the whole body of the rearguard stretched out upon a mile of the way, of the narrow way, and everywhere dark masses of men not in the accoutrement of the host, livelier, striking with knives, not sworded; and perpetually, as men fell, and as traces were cut and teams destroyed, these enemies would leap off into the undergrowth again laden with booty. All the while there rang in that echoing place cries in a tongue he did not know, and that no man knew--the Basque tongue, the oldest tongue of the world. And urging the mountaineers on and on, in rush after rush from the heights, in charge after charge from the depths, was the little bagpipe of the mountains, screaming its war scream--the little bagpipe of goatskin, with its two flutes which the mountaineers threddle with their fingers, while their eyes gleam. That was what he saw--the destruction of all for which he stood responsible to his young king, who, in the plains below, had already camped his great army after the passage of the mountains. Men see such things manifold and disastrous in one manifold and disastrous moment; and Roland had seen this in the moment between his reining up upon the sward above the road and the charge of the mountaineers against him. He drew the two-handed sword from its sheath; he had not time, nor any of his companions, to helm; but in some hope of succour, or in the determination to die, he formed them into a little square against the onrush. But even as they formed they were borne down. The mountaineers were upon them in a hundred, and then in a thousand, stabbing with the short knife, and with three men to take the place of one who went down under the long sweep of the sword, delivered heavily from the saddle.