They that led them were short, lean men with hard, clean-shaven faces, bronzed in colour, and on their heads they wore a loose, flat cap that hung to one side or the other. Each man led his beast, and each beast was heavily laden as it picked its way down the slope; and here and there, sitting sideways upon her mount, was a woman of these hills, holding in her arms a child. The sun had not yet risen behind the red earth of the eastern peaks. The broken road that had once been a passage for the Roman armies over the Pyrenees (and that was now a mere bank, unsurfaced, down which the mules warily shuffled) was touched everywhere with rime. For it was but the opening of summer, and the snow still lay everywhere upon the high mountains around. At the head of the valley below, fixed in the narrow valley floor, lay huddled and tangled together such a little mass of dirty brown as looked like a fantastic chaos of rock. As one came closer one could see that it was a cluster of human buildings--a town, but a town so squeezed together, so suspicious of all around, so made for defence, that, seen from the pass above, it was like the shell of some armoured animal. One street alone led through its houses, very narrow indeed (for up in these mountains nothing goes on wheels)--so narrow that two loaded mules could barely pass. And this narrow street, under the first glory of the morning sky, which made a strip of light above it, was full of the cries of sellers and of grooms, of the stamping of horses’ feet, and of the innumerable little jingles of steel which come from bit and bridle and curb, stirrup and scabbard and halter-chain, and the rings of mail upon a hauberk, wherever men are gathered together to ride out in arms. For there was in this town an assembly made of farmers and free men and one or two lords as well. They had come for the beginning of the summer season, now that the crops were sown, to ride out south against the Mahommedan, to see what they could see, and take what they could take. It was for this force that the mules were coming over the hills to provision it. A great train did every such expedition need of servitors, and oats, bread twice baked, and salted meat tied tightly round with strings, olives also, and oil and much wine; four men, perhaps, afoot for one that fought on horseback; and many of those afoot were half slaves. Under the low, thick arch, where the track came in through the town wall and became the narrow street of the town, swayed in the first of that long procession of mules. To the cries of the sellers and the grooms, and to the jingling of steel links, there was now added the music of little bells. But dominant over all such noises, louder than them all, and a background of sound upon which all this life was woven, was the torrent swollen with the melting snow that ran beyond the houses a few yards to the east, and filled the deep, cool valley with its rumour. The name of this torrent was Aragon.