In some villages the party was received with traditional hospitality, and was welcomed even more affectionately on recognizing Alorcus, the heir of Endovellicus, the respected chieftain of the tribes of Baraeco which had pastured their flocks for centuries on the banks of the Jalón. When night came they gave up to them their best beds of woven thongs covered with fluffy dried grasses; they impaled a calf on a spit, turning it before an enormous bonfire, for regaling the caravan, and during the journey the women detained them at the entrance to their huts, offering them in coarse earthen vessels the bitter beer brewed in the valleys, and the bread made of acorn flour. Alorcus explained the customs of his people to the Athenian. They gathered acorns, their chief food, exposing them to the sun until well dried. They husked and ground them, and stored the supply of flour for six months. This bread, with game, and the milk of their animals, constituted their principal food. At intervals pestilence robbed them of their flocks, the crops failed, and hunger decimated the tribes; then the strong devoured the weak. Alorcus remembered hearing this from the elders of his tribe as having occurred in remote times when Neton, Autubel, Nabi, and other divinities of the land, irritated against their people, had sent upon them these fearful punishments. The young Celtiberian continued telling of the customs. Some of the women who worked in the fields with so much vigor had perhaps given birth to a child the day before. As soon as born they immersed it in the nearest river, so that by this act, which in many cases caused death, it would grow vigorous and insensible to cold; and while the mother resolutely arose and continued her work, the husband took her place in the bed, lying down with the newly born child. The woman, still barely convalescent, took care of the two, surrounding the hale and hearty husband with comforts, as if in gratitude for the fruit he had given her. Several times the caravan on its march passed men lying rigid and groaning on couches of herbs gathered by the wayside. Flies buzzed about their heads in clouds; an amphora of water stood within their reach. A child squatted near the couch brushing away the insects with a branch. They were sick people whom their relatives exposed by the roadside according to ancient custom, partly to implore the clemency of the divinities by exhibiting their misery, and also in order that passing travelers might advise a remedy, thus transmitting prescriptions from distant countries.