But nobody else will guess who you are.
Nobody else around here is an idiot!" Again, as with Tanno's utterance when we were leaving my villa, the words fell on my ears but did not penetrate to my thinking consciousness.

Had I noted what I heard, had I thought instantaneously of what the idiot's words really signified, I might even then have saved myself.
We plodded on, a long cavalcade of horsemen and bevy of men afoot, convoying a shut litter and a closed travelling carriage.
Round the turn of the road, after passing the idiot and his goats, with the brawling stream of the Bran Brook, now swollen to a respectable little river, on our left, with the wooded hills rising on our right, we entered the long, narrow winding single street of Vediamnum, a paved lane along the close-crowded tall stone houses built against the hillside on the northeast, with the stream along it to the southwest, and houses wedged between the street and the stream, brokenly, for about half of its length, with open intervals between.
As we entered the village I saw ahead on the street not a human form, saw no face at any door of any house.

I wondered over this, wondered uncomprehendingly.

I had never seen the street of Vediamnum.

wholly deserted, not even in rains much harder than that which descended on us.
Still wondering, still uncomprehending, when we were far enough into the village for the travelling carriage to be already between the first houses, I saw fall across the roadway, in front of me, two stout trunks of trimmed trees, straight like pine trees; I heard the crash as they jarred on the stones of the stream-side wall, I saw them quiver as they settled; breast high and shoulder high from house-wall to house-wall, effectually blocking the highway.
At the same instant there sounded a chorus of yells, shouts, calls, cheers and commands; and men poured out of the house doors, out of the alleys between the houses, up the river bank in the unbuilt intervals; men hatless and cloakless, clad only in their tunics, men with clubs, with staffs, with staves, with bludgeons, with cudgels, men yelling: "Greia! Greia! Rescue Greia! Club 'em! Brain 'em! Chase 'em! Vedius forever! At 'em boys! Mustard's the word! Make 'em run! Rescue Posis!" They clubbed us.