The camp was all alive and humming like a hive of bees when the three arrived, for a train of mules from the district round which Yanni and Mitsos had made their first journey had just come in, bringing the secret grindings of the mills from Kalyvia and Tsimova. This was the first consignment of powder which had arrived, and Petrobey was superintending its stowage in the magazine. Elsewhere the thin blue smoke of wood fires, over which men were cooking their coffee for breakfast, rose up straight into the air, and the flicking and flashing of axes in the morning sun showed others still at work on pine-felling. During the last two nights many parties of the clan and the patriots from the villages round had been arriving with their arms and provisions, and a herd of sheep and goats were browsing on the scrub-clad sides of the ravine below the camp. Already there were not fewer than two hundred men there, and before three days Petrobey hoped that the whole depot, consisting of eight hundred men with arms and ammunition, would be assembled. Farther along the sides of the mountain there were three similar camps, and thus the total number of men who would march down from Taygetus onto Kalamata would be a tale of over three thousand. These were all drawn from Laconia, Argolis, and the south of Arcadia, and the number would be raised to close on five thousand by additions from the populous Messenian plain. The patriots in the north of Greece would, at the beacon-signal, rise simultaneously in Achaia as soon as the camps all contained their complement of men.