The disappointed spectators of Philip’s landing were to be more than compensated ere long by the arrival of another royal guest. By September 21 Richard, travelling leisurely along the coast from Salerno, had reached Mileto in Calabria. Here a characteristic adventure nearly brought to an untimely end both his enterprise and his life. He was riding forth next day, accompanied only by one knight, “and as they passed through a little township the king turned aside towards a house where he heard the voice of a falcon, and he went into the house and took the bird; and when he would not let it go, a number of villagers came running up and attacked him with stones and sticks. One of them drew his knife upon the king, and the king beat the man with the flat of his sword till the sword broke. The other assailants he overcame with stones, and narrowly escaping from their hands made his way to the Priory of La Bagnara.” There, finding himself close to what an English chronicler describes as “the great river which is called the Far of Messina,” he took boat and crossed it immediately, and “lay that night in a tent hard by the great stone tower which stands by the entrance to the Far on the Sicilian side”—that is, the pharos, lighthouse, or beacon-tower which gave the strait its medieval name.[503] He probably crossed in a vessel of his own fleet, the whole of which seems to have been assembled at the northern end of the strait in readiness to meet him. [Sidenote: _Sept. 23_] Next day (September 23) he sailed at its head into the harbour of Messina. “The galleys filled the Strait; they were crowded with hardy looking warriors, and decked with pennons and banners. So came the king to the shore,”[504] amid such blowing of horns and trumpets that “all the city was alarmed at the sound.” Philip and the governors and people of Messina went down to the beach and stood there “marvelling at that which they saw and heard of the king of England and of his power.”[505] Richard “leaped ashore,” and went immediately to speak with Philip.[506] Meanwhile those of his barons who had reached Messina before him brought “the fine destriers which had come over in the transport ships; and he and his people all mounted on horseback,”[507] and rode to their lodging, which—the royal palace being, by permission of the new sovereign of Sicily, occupied by Philip—was being prepared for them in the house of one of the Sicilian king’s officers, “in the suburb outside the city wall, among the vineyards.”[508]