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Against Rome |
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Back to section vii of this chapter V. Dorix, The Alps, 218 B.C. viii “Does
it seem to you there are more Gauls shadowing us up on the ridges?” Hannibal
asked Maharbal, scanning those ridges as he spoke. “Oh,
yes. Their numbers seem to have increased since this morning, and more today
than yesterday,” replied Maharbal, whose job it was to post outriders and send
out scouts. And, he reflected, to worry about such things even when his
commander would not. “Keep
an eye out—I’m not looking forward to this gorge.” Maharbal
nodded, relieved that Hannibal had finally abandoned his optimism and seemed
almost as concerned as Maharbal was himself. He rode off to extend his scouts
again and then to scout the gorge personally. While
the journey had so far been merely long and arduous, Maharbal felt the easy part
was well behind them now. As Hannibal’s optimism had been slow to leak away,
so that only now was the general showing misgivings, Maharbal’s pessimism had
doubled every day of the march from the Island. He
did not trust Gauls in general, quite frankly, and Brancus had been too generous
by far, too willing to cough up thousands of pairs of boots, thousands of heavy
cloaks, many wagons of food. Perhaps
he was only doing as Vendorix had done: putting on a friendly face while hiding
his women and his gold. Vendorix’s deception had not gone unnoticed, by
Maharbal at least, even if not by Hannibal. But
perhaps it was more than a simple sham to avoid rousing a huge, hungry beast.
Perhaps Brancus had treachery in mind. If so, he needn’t carry it out on his
own lands. He could see that an attack on Hannibal’s column occurred far from
himself, perhaps not even carried out by his own people, but still to his
benefit. The motive was certainly large enough, given Hannibal’s enormous
baggage train and his thousands of valuable animals. Moreover,
it did not have to be Brancus behind the ambush that Maharbal felt rising in his
mind. Who else had a motive for attack? Brancus’s brother, Dormas, for one,
against whose interests Hannibal had helped Brancus. If attacked, they might
never know which it was. Maharbal
rode into the gorge wishing he had the myriad eyes of Argus. *
* * All
during the morning of the next day, the army climbed the steepening valley away
from the river. Hannibal felt the terrain dangerous enough already, but the
scouts reported the valley narrowing sharply ahead, until it entered the deep
gorge that Brancus and Talus had warned him about. After
scouting the gorge, through which ran a small tributary of the Druna, Maharbal
reported a winding, narrowing canyon, as wide as several hundred feet but often
less than a hundred, with steep sides that kept getting steeper until they
became vertical. “It’s
ugly,” he said. Above
these steep sides and the vertical walls, small cliffs and delicately balanced
piles of boulders angled in natural terraces up the mountainsides. Once
its walls became vertical, the gorge went on for several miles, continuing to
grow deeper as the mountains rose around it until, at its end, Maharbal
estimated it was at least five hundred and perhaps over a thousand feet deep. He
could not be sure for the darkness in the depths. At
the far end of the gorge was a mountain pass—not a terribly difficult one,
although footing on it would be tricky, Maharbal noted. Leading up to the pass,
the path—if you could call it that—was a slim ledge that rose sharply
from the gorge’s floor hugging the right-hand wall. The
ledge, which began a little before the halfway point in the gorge, formed a kind
of treacherous-looking road, wide enough in most places for two or three men to
walk abreast, or a couple of horses. From all signs, the ledge had indeed long
been used as a road by the mountain people despite its steepness, narrowness,
and occasional sections of sloped, slippery rock. The height from the top of the
gorge down to the ledge varied from several hundred feet at the beginning to
nothing as the ledge became a track snaking upwards into the pass. The
ledge was the point of greatest danger, but also absolutely the only way through
for an army of this size. Thus
the army would have to travel along the highly exposed length of the gorge, with
hundreds of feet of sloping, terraced walls providing room above for the Gauls
to roll rocks down on the column. Once
the column had run the first part of this gauntlet and started up the narrow
ledge that formed the road, the heights continued to be just as perilous above
on the right, while on the left the chasm dropped away to the rocks in the
darkness far, far below. Maharbal had shuddered as he stood on the ledge,
stomach hollow with dread, staring down into the impenetrable depths. The
terrain could hardly be worse. And
worst of all, as Hannibal’s men had seen on their arrival at the gorge, the
Gauls had already occupied the heights above the gorge, just waiting to pounce
on the exposed column below, crushing it under a hail of boulders and a rain of
arrows and spears. Afterwards,
the smashed remains would be theirs for the picking, easily the greatest haul of
war spoils anyone in these mountains had ever seen or even heard of. Unfortunately,
Hannibal could not afford to wait for more favorable conditions—catching the
Gauls off guard or finding a way to attack them first. Maharbal could see the
passing time eating at him ravenously. It had to be now. Hannibal
did have a trick up his sleeve, however. The observant Maharbal had been
monitoring the entrance to the gorge since the day before and noticed that when
the sun sank, which it did early among these peaks, the Gauls could be seen
leaving their high posts, presumably retiring to nearby but unseen villages for
the night. At dawn that morning, they had been back in place. There was no
chance the army could negotiate the gorge at night, but Maharbal reported
opportunity in the dispositions and the habits of the Gauls. *
* * Late
that afternoon, Hannibal halted the column and told his officers to make it look
as if the army would camp again just before the entrance to the gorge, where the
valley was still wide enough to be out of missile range of the ridges. Word
quickly spread among the men. Following orders, they began slowly erecting tents
and quickly building many campfires, which a few of them maintained into the
night. They also unloaded the wagons, in preparation for abandoning them, for
they might be too difficult to take through the gorge. The men would move their
contents onto mules and horses for the passage through the gorge and then the
rest of the journey. Putting
the tents up stopped as soon as it was dark, having presented just the right
illusion, and the men hastily struck them and repacked them, now on mules, then
bedded down on the slopes without cover, their gear still packed. When
it was almost full dark, though with some rising moonlight available, Hannibal
led a picked force of light infantry out of camp, gambling that the scouts were
correct about the tribesmen retiring at night. In the next several hours, the
men carefully climbed the heights above the gorge ahead and settled into hidden
positions all along the deep canyon and somewhat higher than where the Gauls had
been seen. Hannibal set out a watch just in case, and the infantry force got
what sleep they could in their hiding places. Next
morning, the Allobroges could be seen climbing back to the heights. They soon
discovered Hannibal’s men above them but stayed where they were, watching the
army and watching Hannibal. It
was the sixteenth day of October. Now,
led by Maharbal, the army started into the gorge, probably much sooner than the
Gauls expected, since the men had only to begin marching, their tents and other
gear, excluding weapons, already packed and ready to go. As
the gorge was some miles long and the ledge up to the pass both narrow and
dangerous to walk on, it took several hours for the column’s vanguard to climb
the ledge for the length of the gorge and start ascending the pass. During
this time, the Gauls did nothing but watch. Still, the marching men were
apprehensive, not sure whether the Gauls would attack with Hannibal sitting on
the slope above them. *
* * Dorix
and Borix were about halfway through the gorge, picking their way along
cautiously with the rest of the column. The
boys had just begun ascending the ledge and were perhaps two hundred feet above
the gorge floor, which they could still see, though the depths farther on grew
dimmer and darker. The Gauls stationed at this point of the gorge were a good
four hundred feet above the twins. Dorix craned his neck back trying to see his
potential attackers. The column had lost cohesion as men struggled up the ledge
at different speeds, blocked here and there by frightened animals refusing to go
on. Men, horses, and mules were spread along the track at random intervals. Dorix
had already seen men and animals fall ahead of them, for the ledge was slanted
in places, sometimes slick, and sometimes composed of loose rock. The cliff
above it on the right was as straight up and down as the cliff into the abyss on
the left. A
moment ago, three mules, heavily loaded and tethered together, on reaching a
particularly narrow spot had panicked and begun jerking this way and that in
their fright. To Dorix’s horror, and before anything could be done, all three
mules, their driver, and several nearby soldiers were swept off the ledge and
fell screaming to their deaths. Their screams echoed and reechoed even after
they were long a broken heap at the bottom, a cacophony of horror that left
Dorix in a state of shock. “Gods!”
Borix said. “It looks impossible!” “Exactly
what Uncle Geta would say,” Dorix replied. “Come on, buck up and keep
moving. We have luck, you and I.” It
had taken a good deal of his story-telling skill to make himself seem calm to
Borix. They
kept on. A few minutes later, on a particularly slanted section of the ledge,
Dorix slipped. One foot caught a loose stone and both feet flew out from under
him, his arms windmilling frantically. He knew a moment of deep terror, for he
surely would have fallen had not Borix caught his arm and stopped his tumble.
Praise the gods! Dorix thought. “Thanks!”
he said, getting his feet back under him. To
make matters worse, the gorge was shadowy. The sun penetrated into its depths
only in spots, and the light was generally dim, making the track more
treacherous still, a maze of shadows broken by harshly reflected sunlight. Dorix
tried to shield his eyes, but it did no good. The boys lurched on. Dorix
was more afraid than he had ever been, trying not to push those ahead, trying
not to slip and fall, trying not to be pushed by those behind, trying not to be
in the path of someone else who fell. It
was at that moment that the first rocks began to rain down from above, scores of
them, then hundreds, hailstones of unimaginable size, accompanied by the
heart-chilling war cries and warbling yells of the Gauls above. Dorix
happened to see one of the first boulders, a rock the size of a horse, strike
the ledge forty feet ahead of them, where it bounded up and mowed over half a
dozen men, several horses, and two mules. All of them pitched together over the
edge and down to the doom that Dorix had seen clearly written on their horrified
faces, the boulder falling with them, louder than anything but the victims’
screams as it ricocheted off the walls until it crashed into the stream far
below. The
cries continued to reverberate for long moments, thunderous in the confined
space. Horses, mules, and men screamed and bellowed all along the gorge,
panicked, the animals plunging and bucking, the men casting about for shelter,
and Dorix could hear the screams of others falling as well. The
crash of boulders, echoing through the canyon along with the screams, deafened
Dorix, and the rain of stone was multiplied a thousand-fold by shadows racing
the boulders down the walls so the light in the gorge stuttered and flashed and
bewildered the eye. Dorix
stood transfixed, watching the rain of boulders before and behind. A nightmare
hailstorm of the gods hammered down on the ledge and its occupants all along its
length. It was chaos. Many
rocks fell directly onto men or animals, crushing them instantly as they struck
with great velocity and force. Sometimes stones and bodies went on over the
edge. Sometimes they merely blocked part of the track, making it even more
difficult for those behind to pass, staring dumbly as they did so at the broken
remains. The
boys came to one man whose legs and lower body were trapped under a mass of
rock, out of which flowed quantities of the man’s blood. It
was Idontus, the muscular Iberian that Borix had fought. “Please,”
Idontus pleaded. The big man was weeping, pushing ineffectually at the rocks
pinning him as if he’d not had the strength of Hercules the last time the
twins had seen him. “What?”
Borix asked. “Kill
me,” Idontus said, looking directly into Borix’s eyes. “Kill me!” “I
can’t do that,” Borix said, face a shocked mask. He stepped back a pace. “The
pain. Kill me.” Idontus’s voice sang with agony. Borix
stood there. Somehow,
Dorix knew what to do. He stepped past Borix, drew his sword, raised it high,
gripped in both hands, and brought the point down into Idontus’s chest, into
his heart. A further rictus of pain gave way to a brief, faint smile of
gratitude on the Iberian’s tortured face. Then he was peacefully dead. Borix
stared at Dorix, face white. Now
some of the Gauls at the cliff-top systematically fired their arrows and spears
down upon the column, trying apparently to hit the animals especially. This
caused even more havoc as the beasts, stung with pain, went mad, pulling and
pushing men and animals around them. Hundreds of men and pack animals were
falling to their deaths or buried under heaps of rubble. A
frightened mule with an arrow in its flank whose load had slipped down under its
belly lashed out in a hard kick that sent a man behind it tumbling over the
edge, his scream of pain turning instantly to one of doom. The
mule continued to kick, kick after kick, as it came closer to the edge. Then it
was gone, too. Its legs scrabbled on the loose shale at the edge of the track as
it tried to save itself. Then with a long, frightened squeal it fell. Its body
bounced off the rough cliff below. Borix
pulled Dorix back against the wall beside the road. Flattened out, they inched
along to pass a pile of men and rocks. Missiles of all kinds continued to rain
down all around them, cracking or crashing off the stone as they struck. Besides
the big rocks, there were showers of pebbles and small stones caroming off the
walls and the trail. Fragments stung Dorix’s face and arms. At
a loud crack nearby, Dorix jerked his head around, looking for the source. In
that instant, a sizable boulder bounded past him, literally brushing his arm.
Dorix saw it from the corner of his eye, saw and felt how close it had come to
him. Borix!
He
looked around, confused by the flying shadows and light that made a
phantasmagoria of the dim canyon. He couldn’t find Borix. The
stone had carried off his brother, who no longer stood beside him. It had gone
right through the space where Borix was standing. After
long, frantic minutes of casting about him in the flickering gloom for a sign of
Borix, Dorix moved on along the ledge, continuing to search. “Borix!” he
called two or three times. No,
Borix couldn’t be dead. Dorix did not want to believe what he’d seen. But Borix was gone. End of Chapter 5 Back to Top
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