The experienced seaman did not know what ships were doing there, but it was hardly anything good; for ravens in a countless multitude were to be seen on the shore and all moved toward the left.

Philippus’s appearance on deck interrupted the nauarch.  He anxiously showed the birds to the old hero also, and the latter’s only reply was, “Watch the helm and sails!”

Yonder squadron, Philippus said to the artist, was a part of his son’s fleet; what brought it there was a mystery to him too.

After the early meal, the galley of Eumedes approached his father’s trireme.  Two other galleys, not much inferior in size, were behind, and probably fifty smaller vessels were moving about the mouth of the Nile and the whole dreary tongue of land.

All belonged to the royal war fleet, and the deck of every one was crowded with armed soldiers.

On one a forest of lances bristled in the murky air, and upon its southward side a row of archers, each man holding his bow in his hand, stood shoulder to shoulder.

At what mark were their arrows to be aimed?  The men on board the Galatea saw it distinctly, for the shore was swarming with human figures, here standing crowded closely together, like horses attacked by a pack of wolves; yonder running, singly or in groups, toward the sea or into the land.  Dark spots on the light sand marked the places where others had thrown themselves on the ground, or, kneeling, stretched out their arms as if in defence.

Who were the people who populated this usually uninhabited, inhospitable place so densely and in so strange a manner?

This could not be distinguished from the Galatea with the naked eye, but Philippus thought that they were the Gauls whose punishment had been intrusted to his son, and it soon proved that the old general was right; for just as the Galatea was approaching the shore, a band of twenty or thirty men plunged into the sea.  They were Gauls.  The light complexions and fair and red bristling hair showed this—­Philippus knew them, and Hermon remembered the hordes of men who had rushed past him on the ride to Tennis.

But the watchers were allowed only a short time for observation; brief shouts of command rang from the ships near them, long bows were raised in the air, and one after another of the light-hued forms in the water threw up its arms, sprang up, or sank motionless into the waves around them, which were dyed with a crimson stain.

The artist shuddered; the gray-haired general covered his head with his cloak, and the Lady Thyone followed his example, uttering her son’s name in a tone of loud lamentation.

The nauarch pointed to the black birds in the air and close above the shore and the water; but the shout, “A boat from the admiral’s galley!” soon attracted the attention of the voyagers on the Galatea in a new direction.

Thirty powerful rowers were urging the long, narrow boat toward them.  Sometimes raised high on the crest of a mountain wave, sometimes sinking into the hollow, it completed its trip, and Eumedes mounted a swinging rope ladder to the Galatea’s deck as nimbly as a boy.