CHAPTER X.Athelney and Combwich.
In the morning King Alfred took us to the southern end of his island, and there told us what his plans were.

And as we listened they seemed to us to be wiser than mortal mind could have made, so simple and yet so sure were they, as most great plans will be.

It is no wonder that his people hold that he was taught them from above.
He bade us look across the fens to the wooded heights of Selwood Forest, to south and east, and to the bold spur of the Polden Hills beyond the Parret that they call Edington.

There was nought but fen and river and marsh between them and us--"impassable by the Danes who prowled there.

Only at the place where the two rivers join was a steep, rounded hill, that stood up strangely from the level--the hill that they call the Stane, on Stanmoor; and there were other islands like this on which we stood, unseen among the thickets, or so low that one might not know of them until upon them.
"Now," he said, "sooner or later the Danes will know I am here, where they cannot reach me.