Of course there were heavy risks that a lone traveller would
not make a safe passage by this land route, if he were bidden to
sacrifice all precautions to speed. But Phorenice was no niggard
with her couriers. She sent a corps of twenty to the headland that
overlooks the sea-entrance to the straits; they started with the
news, each on his own route; and it says much for their speed and
cleverness, that no fewer than seven of these agile fellows came
through scathless with their tidings, and of the others it was said
that quite three were known to have survived.

Still, about this we had no means of knowing at the time, and
pushed on in fancy that our coming was quite unheralded. The
slaves on the galley's row-banks were for the most part savages
from Europe, and the smell of them was so offensive that the voyage
lost all its pleasures; and as, moreover, the wind carried with it
an infinite abundance of small grit from some erupting fire
mountain, we were anxious to linger as little as possible.
Besides, if I may confess to such a thing without being unduly
degraded, although by my priestly training I had been taught
stoicism, and knew that all the future was in the hands of the
Gods, I was frailly human still to have a very vast curiosity as to
what would be the form of my own reception at Atlantis. I could
imagine myself taken a formal prisoner on landing, and set on a
formal trial to answer for my cure of the colony of Yucatan; I
could imagine myself stepping ashore unknown and unnoticed, and
after a due lapse, being sent for by the Empress to take up new
duties; but the manner of my real welcome was a thing I did not
even guess at.