Chapter XLIX.

An Homeric Song.
It is time to pass to the other camp, and to describe at once the combatants and the field of battle.

Aramis and Porthos had gone to the grotto of Locmaria with the expectation of finding there their canoe ready armed, as well as the three Bretons, their assistants; and they at first hoped to make the bark pass through the little issue of the cavern, concealing in that fashion both their labors and their flight.
The arrival of the fox and dogs obliged them to remain concealed.

The grotto extended the space of about a hundred _toises_, to that little slope dominating a creek.

Formerly a temple of the Celtic divinities, when Belle-Isle was still called Kalonese, this grotto had beheld more than one human sacrifice accomplished in its mystic depths.