Two men stood in the sunlight on the cliff-top, looking down towards the sea. The disturbed gulls circled low over their heads, squawking with anger at their intrusion, but the men ignored the birds. They had other problems to think of; the wings that echoed in their minds were the pinions of death.

The village of Venta Icenorum, the tribal settlement of Boudicca, lay so near to the sea that the smell of seaweed was as familiar as that of bread.It was a grey place, of round stone huts with their reed-thatched roofs, set in a little hollow and surrounded by groves of oak-trees. The men of that village were proud of its main street, made after the new Roman style. It was a short street, hardly more than a hundred paces long. To make it so, many of the older huts had had to be torn down. At first the men of the Iceni had not liked this, for their fathers and grandfathers had lived in those huts. Many of them had been buried beneath the cow-dung floors of the huts. Their bones were the gods of the houses.

That door will never leave my mind, though God lets me live to be ninety—which I earnestly pray He may not, for I have seen enough suffering, known enough evil, to suffice as it is . . . But it is the door of which I speak now, and not of myself. It was a tall, narrow door, always painted cream, in contrast with the heavier sombre colours of the rest of the house. Its handle was of carefully polished brass, by the side of which there was screwed a long, oval dutch tile, with a blue-painted scene of canal-boats and windmills on it

The military attaché’s voice cut, harsh and unfriendly, across the great thatched and timbered hall. “By Jupiter and his seven-headed dog, but I can show you a sort of magic to beat that!”Heavy with the native mead, he clattered and stumbled through the peat-smoke towards the log-fire in the centre of the hall, the silver bracelets at his wrists making gleaming arcs in the firelight as he swung his long arms about drunkenly. He was a short man, almost as broad as he was high, bull-necked, and bow-legged from much riding, swarthy as an African, with curling black hair and bright Spanish eyes, an ex-centurion, risen from the ranks, whose coloured ribbons, hanging from the shoulders of his body-armour, proclaimed the service as a soldier in India, Scythia and Germany that lay behind him.

Then as darkness fled and sun smiled warmly on the land, the rains began to fall. Trees planted themselves wherever they could find a footing—birch and pine, oak and elm, hazel and indomitable alder.So the hunting grounds became fewer, for the trees’ great army had occupied the land, and at last men looked towards the sea for food, forgetting the sweet taste of deer and giant ox, grateful gleaners of salt shellfish now.At length, majestic, sea roared down the tree-hung valley, and one golden morning an island stood separate, new-born, afraid with loneliness. Those who came now must cross in boats, must dare death in the valley, among the blackened oaks.