The following year Caesar determined to invade the island on a larger scale. His first expedition had been obliged to remain ingloriously within sight and sound of the waves; but this time the general resolved to push into the heart of the country. Sailing from his former harbour, his force numbered five legions and two thousand horse, roughly 27,000 men, and with this army, considerable as times went, he landed, unopposed, at Deal on the morning of July 22. Caesar tells us that the Britons were frightened by the great number of his ships seen sailing across the Channel, but the truth seems to be that he had been sowing jealousies and dissensions among the petty chiefs and kinglets of Kent, and that a secret understanding was arrived at between himself and a discreditable son of King Lud by which his landing should not be contested. However that may be, Caesar left a guard over his vessels, and started immediately on a twelve miles' night march inland, in force. When morning dawned, he found himself on a high table-land with a river flowing along a valley below him, and here he first descried the Britons. The place at which Caesar had arrived was Barham Downs, and the river he saw was the Lesser Stour, that even now, although a much smaller stream than then, flows through the valley to the right of the Dover Road. A road of some sort existed even at that time, although it perhaps might be more correctly described as a "track." Down it went the exports of that far distant age; the undressed skins of wild animals; the dogs and the gold; and up this way from the primitive Dover came the beads and the trinkets; the manufactures of pottery and glass, which our very remote fathers loved as much as the uncivilized races of to-day delight in the selfsame kind of thing. Caesar deployed his forces along the ridge of the Downs facing the road, the river, and the enemy, who had entrenchments on the further side of the river immediately fronting him and others advancing diagonally toward the road which they crossed on the northern hill-top at Bridge, ending at a point slightly to the north-east of the place where Bekesbourne Station stands now. Caesar's first object was to reach the water in the valley, there to refresh his horses, and a forward cavalry movement was made with this object. [Illustration: "OLD ENGLAND'S HOLE."] [Sidenote: "OLD ENGLAND'S HOLE."]