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There were lights everywhere about the castle, now. All along the battlements men had set light to fire-baskets and lowered them partway down the walls, to disclose any attacking force which might have dishonorable intentions toward the stronghold. Others waved torches from the battlements. Thal swung his torch and pointed to the ground. "They rode here!" he called to Hoddan.
They traveled swiftly, but every two hours or so they would make a brief halt beside a spring to drink and breathe themselves and to look to the precious fires in the fire-baskets. When it wanted perhaps an hour of noon, they came to a little patch of meadow surrounding a solitary Judas-tree covered with bloom.
At one end of the vast quarry was a demolished house, showing flues and fireplaces and a score of thicknesses of old wallpaper; and at night they might well have stood up on the tops of the buses! A dozen great spluttering violet arc-lights half-blinded you; down below were the watchmen's fires; overhead, the riveters had their fire-baskets; and in odd corners naphtha-lights guttered and flared.
But there was little time for analysis. For now already they were passing through a complex series of inner gateways, passages, detours and labyrinthic defenses which all well lighted from above by fire-baskets spoke only too plainly the character of the enclosure within. "A walled town, heavily fortified," Stern realized as he and Beatrice were thrust forward through the last gate.
Here they built a fire, for the replenishing of the coals in the fire-baskets, and as a menace to prowling beasts. Then they dined on their sun-dried meat and on ripe plantains gathered during the journey.
Such of the young women as had no small children to carry bore the heavy burdens of the fire-baskets, or bundles of smoke-dried meat, leaving the warriors free to use their bows and spears. In traversing the swamp the march was sometimes at ground-level, sometimes high in the tree-tops. In the tree-tops it was safer, but the progress was slow and laborious.
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