Kolocotrones had left Lerna to take up his position on the hills before Petrobey, with his Mainats, arrived, and it was to below an outlying post of his camp that Yanni climbed to signal to those in the Larissa. The day was extraordinarily hot, and his way lay over long, palpitating flanks of gray bowlder-covered hills. There all vegetation had long ago been shrivelled into brown, ashy wisps of stuff, though up higher, near the point to which he was making, a spring which gushed from the mountain-side still flushed an acre or two of cup-shaped hollow below it with living vegetation. The great green lizards alone seemed not to have been turned brown by the drought, and slipped pattering over the bowlders into cracks and crevices as Yanni passed. Overhead the sky was a brazen wilderness, deserted of birds, and the air over the hot mountain trembled and throbbed in an ague of heat. But Yanni went fast and very cheerfully. He carried no arms, for the Turks never went beyond the plain, and it was a healthier heat to walk just in linen trousers and shirt, open from neck to waist, than to lie sweltering in guard and under arms in the camp at the hills of Lerna. An hour's climb gave him elevation sufficient to be able to see over the outer circuit of walls on the Larissa, and show him the sun-browned tops of the hill peopled with the tiny, living, moving specks of the garrison who held it. Below the base of the hill the lines of Turkish tents formed a circuit nearly complete, but at the back, where the rocks rose almost precipitously, there was a break in them. Whether the hill was accessible or not at that point he did not know--evidently the Turks seemed to think not--but if he succeeded in attracting the attention of the Greeks in the citadel, he could learn from them where was the best place to make the attempt. He had brought with him a strip of linen for the signalling, but finding the distance was greater than he anticipated, he saw that it would be too insignificant an object to be noticed, and, stripping off his shirt, he made wild waving with it, signalling again and again, "Mitsos! Mitsos Codones!" For five minutes he stood there, with the sun scorching his uncovered shoulders like a hot iron, without attracting any attention; but before very much longer he saw a little white speck from the top of the citadel, also waving, it would seem, with purpose. "Oh, Mitsos, is it you?" he said, aloud, and then repeated "Mitsos" as his signal, and waited. The little speck answered him. "Yes, I am Mitsos," it said. "Who are you?" Yanni laughed with delight. "Yanni," he waved, "your cousin Yanni." "Have the clan come." "Many okes of them, under father. We are going to send a party to support you in the citadel to-night, an hour before moonrise. Be ready." There was a pause, and Yanni, forgetting that he was rather over a mile off, shouted out, "Do you see, little Mitsos?" and then laughed at himself. Soon the waving began again.