"Forgotten," said she, turning to Pabo, and throwing back her hood. "Forgotten! Nay, Nest will never forget one of her own people--never." CHAPTER XX THE BRACELET OF MAXEN "Look at me," said Nest; "I am the daughter of Rhys and sister of your Prince Griffith. How I have been treated God knows, but not worse than my dear country. I have been cast into the arms of one of its oppressors, and I welcome it, because I can do something thereby for those of my people who suffer. Griffith is about. He will do great things. I sent him with warning to you. And now I will even yet save you. Know you where you are? Whither I have brought you? Come further." She led him down among the smooth shoulders of rock, and showed him pans scooped in the limestone ledges that brimmed with water. There was no well in Careg Cennen. It would not have availed to have sunk one. In the dry limestone there were no springs. Gerald the Norman would not have reared his castle on this barren head of rock had he not known that water was accessible in this natural cave. But this cavern had been known and utilized long before the Norman adventurers burst into Wales. At some remote age, we know not how many centuries or tens of centuries before, some warfaring people had surrounded the top of the hill with a wall of stones, not set in mortar, but sustained in place by their own weight. And to supply themselves with water, they had cut a path like a thread in the face of the precipice to the mouth of a gaping cavern that could be seen only from the slopes of the Black Mountains, on the further side of the Cennen River. In this vault water incessantly dripped, not in rapid showers, but slowly; in wet weather more rapidly than at times of dryness, yet even in the most burning, rainless seasons, there never was an absolute cessation of falling drops. To receive these, bowls had been scooped out in ledges of rock; and hither came the maidens daily with their pitchers, to supply the wants of all in the castle. What the Norman builders had done was to broaden the path by cutting deeper into the face of the cliff, and to build up the face towards the precipice, leaving loopholes at intervals, to prevent accidents such as might happen through vertigo, or a turn of an ankle, or a slip on the polished lime-rock. The whole mouth of the cavern had also been walled up, so that no one unacquainted with the arrangements within the castle would have suspected its existence. To fill the pitchers the water-carriers were furnished with wooden spoons and shallow ladles, with which they scooped up the liquid from the rock-basins into their vessels.