From a stone seat in front of the house of the priest a figure arose and came forward to meet them, and Polaris and Kalin halted and gazed in wonder. Rose Emer it was--a new and amazing Rose. Ministered to by one of the women of the priest's household, she had slept and bathed, and then had arrayed herself in the full costume of a Sardanian lady of quality, which the woman had brought her. Around her slender form, clinging to each gracious curve was draped a flowing kirtle of a delicate blue tint, belted in below her bosom with a broad girdle of soft, tan-colored leather. Its skirt swept the tops of a pair of gossamer hose of the same hue as the gown. Her feet were encased in neat little laced sandals of material similar to that of the girdle. To complete the effect, her long chestnut hair was plaited and coiled about her head in the Sardanian fashion, and the whole was set off with a filmy blue veil, bound turban-wise, its tassels falling on her shoulder. Kalin advanced and bowed, a courtly and sweeping genuflection. "Thou dost Sardanes honor, lady, and all the valley is the brighter for thy beauty," he murmured. Then Kalin fetched forth a packet of manuscripts, well written in Greek characters on parchments that were yellowed and crinkly with extreme age. "Here be the records of a nation," he said, and set to work to sort them over. CHAPTER XII WAR AND AN ARMISTICE From many an ancient parchment Kalin read to them bits of the lore of the Sardanians, and a strange store of knowledge and incident did the yellowed, leathery scraps unfold. For, as might be judged, the Sardanians had come down from Antiquity; and, as might be guessed, they were an offshoot of old Greece--the Greece that Homer sang. "Some great city had been sacked," explained the priest, "and from its siege one adventurous party of warriors, with some of their women, turned their faces from their home across the Aegean Seas to the Pillars of Hercules even"--which means that they sailed through the Mediterranean to the Straits of Gibraltar--"and passed the pillars to the great seas beyond. There they sail north, seeking the barbarous isles, where strange metals and red-haired slaves might be gathered"--Britain. "From the isles they turned southward toward home again, but a great tempest took their ship and whirled it away from the coasts. Down past the Pillars of Hercules the storm drove them, along the coasts of Libya"--Africa. "For weeks were they buffeted in a mighty gale, whirled ever to the south into the gates of the ice gods. Nearly perishing in the cold and for lack of food, on a day a mighty wave came from the north and their ship rode the crest of it through the barriers of ice, and came to this place.