In front of the army, there was a small plain, perfectly level, lying in an amphitheatre, as it were, of rocks and mountains, with neither thicket, brake, nor hillock to mar its smooth expanse or hinder the shock of armies, and extending perhaps half a mile toward the consular army. Below this, the ground fell off in a long abrupt and rugged declivity, somewhat exceeding a second half mile in length, with many thickets and clumps of trees on its slope, and the hillock at its foot, whereon still frowned Chærea’s cross with the gory and hideous carcase, already blackened by the frosty night wind, hanging from its rough timbers, an awful omen to that army of desperate traitors. Beyond that hillock, the ground swelled again into a lofty ridge, facing the mouth of the gorge in which Catiline had arrayed his army, with all advantages of position, sun and wind in his favor. The sun rose splendid and unclouded, and as his long rays streamed through the hollows in the mountain top, nothing can be conceived more wildly romantic than the mountain scene, more gorgeous and exciting than the living picture, which they illuminated. The hoary pinnacles of the huge mountains with their crowns of thunder-splintered rocks, the eyries of innumerable birds of prey, gleaming all golden in the splendors of the dawn—their long abrupt declivities, broken with crags, feathered with gray and leafless forests, and dotted here and there with masses of rich evergreens, all bathed in soft and misty light—and at the base of them the mouth of the deep gorge, a gulf of massive purple shadow, through which could be descried indistinctly the lines of the deserted palisades and ramparts, whence had marched out that mass of living valor, which now was arrayed in splendid order, just where the broad rays, sweeping down the hills, dwelt in their morning glory. Motionless they stood in their solid formation, as living statues, one mass, as it appeared, of gold and scarlet; for all their casques and shields and corslets were of bright burnished bronze, and all the cassocks of the men, and cloaks of the officers of the vivid hue, named from the flower of the pomegranate; so that, to borrow a splendid image of Xenophon describing the array of the ten thousand, the whole army lightened with brass, and bloomed with crimson. And now, from the camp in the rear a splendid train came sweeping at full speed, with waving crests of crimson horse-hair dancing above their gleaming helmets, and a broad banner fluttering in the air, under the well-known silver eagle, the tutelar bird of Marius, the God of the arch-traitor’s sacrilegious worship. Armed in bright steel, these were the body guard of Catiline, three hundred chosen veterans, the clients of his own and the Cornelian houses, men steeped to the lips in infamy and crime, soldiers of fifty victories, Sylla’s atrocious colonists.