Page:The Song of the Sirens.djvu/282

 bridge is jammed from sunrise to sunset, and as I came southward I passed colony after colony. The roads are thronged all along."

"Got roads there, too?" Balbinus queried.

"As fine roads as any in the empire," Proculus asserted. "With good bridges at every river and some stone bridges. More than a thousand miles of perfect roads, ditched and curbed, paved and full twelve feet wide. They fork beyond the bridge. One to the westward runs to Porolissum, the middle one strikes Sarmatagete and runs on to Apula, the third swings east-wardly through Maluensis to Zusidava. They are well used all spring, summer and autumn."

"But how on earth," said Balbinus, "can you get colonists to go there in the face of all that raiding?"

"You don't understand," said Proculus. "We keep pushing the frontier back all the time. Where I was fighting in an absolutely wild country the first year I was there, is perfectly peaceable now, not only not a massacre, nor inroad, but no disturbances of any kind, not so much as a murder. The farms are thick set all over the country and the people live on them the year round, entirely fearless."

"What do they raise?" asked Balbinus.

"It varies with the part of the country," said Proculus. "Cattle and horses and sheep on the