before, and daybreak found him apparently far to the east of the North
Foreland. What can have been the thoughts of the greatest of men,
helpless in the midst of this treacherous and unknown sea? To every
Roman the sea was bitter, even the tideless Mediterranean, how much
more this furious tide-whipt channel. Caesar cannot but have
remembered how it had half broken him in the previous year. Very
profoundly he must have mistrusted it. But his Gaulish sailors were
doubtless less disturbed; they expected the ebb, and when it came,
every man doing his utmost, the transports were brought as swiftly as
the long ships to that "fair and open" beach where Caesar had landed
in the previous summer, the long beach which Deal and Sandwich hold.

Caesar himself, as it happens, does not tell us that he landed in the
same place upon this his second invasion of Britain as he had done
before; it is to Dion Cassius that we owe the knowledge that he did
so. It is Caesar, however, who tells us that he landed about mid-day
and that all his ships held together and reached shore about the same
time. He adds that there was no enemy to be seen, though, as he
afterwards learned from his prisoners, large bodies of British troops
had been assembled, but, alarmed at the great number of the ships,
more than eight hundred of which, including the ships of the previous
year and the private vessels which some had built for their
convenience, had appeared at one time, they had retreated from the
coast and taken to the heights. The heights must have been the hills
to the south of Canterbury, nearly a day's march from the sea.

If Caesar landed, as we know from Dion Cassius that he did, in the
same place as he had done in the previous year, he must have known all
there was to know about the natural facilities there for camping,
about the supply of fresh water for instance. But perhaps he had not