"I'm not sure what that tells us," said Xenophon, puzzled. He motioned Cleon down from his horse too, and he looped the reins of all three over the twisted branches of a small shrub. The two Boeotians waited patiently fifty yards behind us along the trail, making their own snack and chatting quietly with each other.
"Speak to him more kindly," Xenophon said. "Don't demand to know where the crossing is. Just ask him what he is waiting for."
Cleon scowled, then with great effort softened his expression to a resigned grimace. He squatted beside the boy and questioned him for several minutes, but again to no avail. Just as he was standing up, however, the boy said something briefly in his language, only two or three words. Cleon stood looking at him motionless, as if waiting for more, but the boy had evidently said his piece and would speak no further. He shrugged.
"The boy says he is waiting for Death."
Xenophon looked more closely at the boy's face. "That's strange," he said. "He looks hungry, maybe, but nowhere near death. I wonder what he meant."
Just then, another trickle of gravel slid down and landed at our feet. We had learned to ignore these small slides, but the boy glanced down nervously at the rocks that had fallen before us. The small quantity of gravel was followed by a more substantial fall, this time involving several rocks of a size that could bruise a leg if they were to make a direct hit. I looked up to the top of the ridge, but saw nothing. The boy, however, had hopped down from his perch on the boulder and stood facing us, shifting from foot to foot.
"He looks as if he's about to say something now," I said, for he had opened his mouth and begun to speak, but his words were suddenly drowned by a crash and a deafening, sickening roar. When I looked up I saw that the entire shale cliff-face had split from its underlying structure, like bark sloughing off a rotten tree, had broken into enormous chunks, and was hurtling down upon us.
There was no time to seize our weapons, or to even think-one could only move. Xenophon and I leaped to the trail and raced forward, unthinking, seeking only to beat the crashing rocks we could hear tumbling down from the precipice above us, tearing out shrubs, boulders, everything in their path. Showers of dust, gravel and small rocks were falling about our heads and shoulders, and we seemed to be running impossibly slow, as one does in a nightmare. Within seconds we had skidded around a sharp bend, where the path clung closely to a corner of the cliff, and we realized that barring a collapse of the entire mountain, we were out of the course of the slide and were safe. We pressed our faces and chests against the rock wall, digging in with our fingernails, panting and gasping not from exhaustion, for the run had only been a few yards, but from the soul-purging effect of sheer terror.
For several minutes we listened as the rocks roared down the wall around the corner beyond our vision, slamming into the trail with a deafening crash. Hitting the flat ledge of the trail, the boulders paused briefly, as if to consider their position, then continued their frantic journey, crashing over the side of the lower wall and tumbling into the river below with a great splash of yellowish spray and foam. After a moment the roaring stopped as quickly as it had begun, and we stepped gingerly around our protective corner to witness the destruction.
The trail had been completely obliterated. No sign of life or human activity was evident, and the place where Cleon and our horses had been standing a moment before was piled twenty feet high with huge boulders. Dust hung heavily in the air, making it difficult to see and even to breathe, and the cliff face, which had before been a steep, almost vertical angle, now exhibited a great depression or cave, the depth of which could still not be clearly seen through the dust.
Over the steady throbbing of the river, however, we heard voices-not those of our own party, as we thought at first, but rather young voices-and looking up to the top of the ridge, we saw a line of perhaps fifty figures standing on the crest. The angle of the sun silhouetted them, so we were unable to identify their clothing or appearance, but from their build they looked to be boys-some as young as the one to whom we had spoken, others slightly older. Peering down from the ridge top, they cheered and waved at the destruction, which we now saw had been their own device. Several of the bigger youths were still holding the stout poles they had used as levers to force down boulders from the top and start the slide. The effect must have been even greater than they had originally hoped.
"Pisidians," Xenophon spat. "They ambushed us. We should have listened to the boy. He was waiting for death, he said. Ours. Look!"-and pointing halfway up the hill we saw the same boy energetically leaping and pulling himself from rock to rock up the side of the face, apparently having taken shelter from the slide under his boulder and emerged no worse for wear. How, I wondered, does a boy practice for something like that?
By now, the ruffians on the ridge had seen us, and were howling in outrage at their failure to destroy us with their onslaught. Half the band immediately disappeared, no doubt to take one of their secret trails down the side to finish us off where we stood, while the others began probing frantically with their levers, loosening more rocks and gravel and threatening to send another shower of boulders raining down on us.
Xenophon quickly pushed past me and skidded back around the corner where we had first taken shelter, to see what our options were in that direction. The trail behind us, from which we had come, was impassible. The trail forward was already filling with the shouts of angry boys descending to where we stood. An ominous trickle of gravel was beginning to fall on our heads from above. Xenophon looked at me, wild-eyed, and without a word we both began ripping off our armor, while at the same time half-scrambling, half-tumbling down the steep slope below us, hoping to ease into the river before we were crushed by another avalanche.
"Easing in" was not exactly what transpired, for at that point the river was flowing through a narrow defile with sheer rock faces extending twenty feet above the surface of the foaming water. We paused briefly at the lip, and with a quick prayer to the gods to recall to us the swimming skills we had learned as boys at Erchia, we leaped.
Eight hours later, to the astonishment of the sentries, we limped into camp, naked but for our sandals, covered with deep cuts, bruises, and thorn scratches. Half an hour of battering and near drowning in the roiling river had brought us four miles back downstream, safely out of reach of the Pisidians, but a long trek still from our camp, which we did not reach until dusk. Proxenus had already set about sorrowfully making funeral preparations for us, having been told in great detail by the two terrified Boeotian scouts of our gruesome deaths. He was overjoyed at our return and feted us far into the night with meat and uncut wine, begging us over and over to relate how we had leaped into the river to escape. Word of our adventure even made its way that evening to Cyrus, who had also been told of our untimely deaths, and who stopped by Proxenus' tent to congratulate us on evading this fate.
"Your return is a good omen for the army!" he exclaimed. "I have told the quartermaster to issue you new horses-you can arrange that in the morning. Meanwhile… by Zeus, Theo, take a look at that gash!" And he spent the rest of the evening with us, comparing his own scars with ours, and laughing at the likely reaction of the Pisidian boys when they descended their mountain and found we had disappeared.
About poor Cleon nothing more was ever said; but his loss was not a great one, for he was only an interpreter.
After leaving the Meander, we marched another one hundred and fifty uneventful miles further east, Cyrus celebrating and entertaining local dignitaries as we passed, until we arrived at the vast Plain of Caystros, where the army gathered like a huge flock of noisy crows, wheeling, strutting, and shouting orders and insults at each other. The pause was necessary to rest and regroup, as we had been on the road for over three months now, the weather had become deadly hot, and the Greek troops were slow in becoming acclimated. The Persian contingents in our army-Ariaius' troops and Cyrus' handpicked personal cavalry guard-ribbed the Greeks unmercifully about their complaints, saying that they themselves felt quite refreshed, since after all, we were still traveling through the relatively cool Pisidian mountains. "The best is yet to come," they taunted. "You soft-assed Greeks are going to wilt like flowers in the Syrian desert!"