A deafening roar filled the air and the tunnels exploded into a frenzy of activity. From every passageway a steady stream of armed men gushed forth. Faces that only recently had been more like death masks, frozen with misery and boredom, now became engorged with the ferocious vitality of warriors on the march. A hundred cutlasses clanked ominously against stone and steel. Braces of pistols, sometimes three or four to a man, hung from leather straps slung high across bare chests and burly fists gripped the handles of fearsome boarding axes, blunderbusses, and pikes.
The dust from the floor of the cave rose in a cloud to the tread of 300 feet and quickly enveloped the moving figures in a golden, silty glow. It soon became an awe-inspiring, animated tableau of almost hypnotic power. How often through the ages had bands of desperate men risen up—just so—and answered a heart-pounding call to battle? How many Celts or Vikings, Highlanders or Huns, Zulus or Saracens, Mongols or Sioux had marched out into the early morning mist toward a waiting enemy just as these men were now doing?
On one hand, my modern sensibilities rejected the base instinct that carried men to the battlefield at all, and yet, even I was not immune to the terrible majesty of the scene before me. As for Burrage, his primordial brain had so overwhelmed his philosophical gentility that I had to remind myself that he was still from my century. His muscles quivered and he strained forward as if being absorbed into the consciousness of the army, which now streamed through the Hub and disappeared down the passageway leading to the ocean. His face took on the look of a hungry man peering at a roast. Even Ditty Gunn could not help but notice the metamorphosis of my friend’s demeanor.
“Easy, laddie,” he chuckled softly. “’Twas in yer soul all along, were it no’? Perhaps ye ’ve a wee dram o’ the thistle in yer blood after all!”