The good squire Terigi met the emperor and his cavalcade coming towards
Roncesvalles, and alighted and fell on his knees, telling him the
miserable news, and how all his people were slain but two of his
Paladins, and himself, and the good archbishop. Charles for anguish
began tearing his white locks; but Terigi comforted him against so
doing, by giving an account of the manner of Orlando's death, and how
he had surely gone to heaven. Nevertheless, the squire himself was
broken-hearted with grief and toil; and he had scarcely added a
denouncement of the traitor Gan, and a hope that the emperor would
appease Heaven finally by giving his body to the winds, than he said,
"The cold of death is upon me;" and so he fell dead at the emperor's
feet.

Charles was ready to drop from his saddle for wretchedness. He cried
out, "Let nobody comfort me more. I will have no comfort. Cursed be Gan,
and cursed this horrible day, and this place, and every thing. Let us go
on, like blind miserable men that we are, into Roncesvalles; and have
patience if we can, out of pure misery, like Job, till we do all that
can be done."

So Charles rode on with his nobles; and they say, that for the sake of
the champion of Christendom and the martyrs that died with him, the sun
stood still in the sky till the emperor had seen Orlando, and till the
dead were buried.

Horrible to his eyes was the sight of the field of Roncesvalles. The
Saracens, indeed, had forsaken it, conquered; but all his Paladins but
two were left on it dead, and the slaughtered heaps among which they lay
made the whole valley like a great dumb slaughter-house, trampled up