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way it’s not so steep. Here, let me go first.’ He took possession of her hand with almost too much confidence, drawing her with him down the slippery slope of wet grass towards the waterside. Her smooth-soled court shoes glissaded in the glazed turf, and he stood solidly, large feet planted, and let her slide bodily against him. He looked willowy enough, but he felt like a rock. They blinked at each other for a moment at close quarters, wide-eyed and brow to brow.
    ‘I ought to have introduced myself,’ said the young man, as though prompted by this accidental intimacy, and gave her a dazzled smile. ‘My name’s Hambro—Augustus, of all the dirty tricks. My friends call me Gus.’
    ‘I suspect,’ she said, shifting a little to recover firmer standing, ‘that should be Professor Hambro? And F.S.A. after it? At least!’ But she did not respond with her own name. She was not yet ready to commit herself so far. And after all, this could be only a very passing encounter.
    ‘Just an amateur,’ he said modestly, evading questioning as adroitly as she. ‘Hold tight… the gravel breaks through here, there’s a better grip. Now, look what the river did to one bit of the baths.’
    They stood on the landward edge of the riverside path, very close to the lipping water. Before them the bevelled slope, fifteen feet high, cut off from them the whole upper expanse of Aurae Phiala, with all its flower-beds and stone walls; and all its visitors had vanished with it. They were alone with the silently hurtling river and the great, gross wound it had made in this bank, curls of dark-red soil peeled back and rolling downhill, and a tangle of uprooted broom bushes. At a level slightly higher than their heads, and several yards within the cordon, this raw soil fell away from a dark hole like the mouth of a deep, narrow cave, large enough, perhaps, to admit a small child. The top of it was arched, and looked like brickwork, the pale amber brick of Aurae Phiala. Bushes sagged loosely beneath it; and the masonry at the crown of the arch showed paler than on either curve, as though it had been exposed to the air longer, perhaps concealed by the sheltering broom.
    ‘You know,’ said Gus, as proudly as if he had discovered it himself, ‘what that is? It’s the extreme corner of what must be one hell of a huge hypocaust.’
    ‘Really?’ she said cautiously, still not quite convinced that he was not shooting a shameless line in exploitation of her supposed ignorance. ‘What’s a hypocaust?’
    ‘It’s the system of brick flues that runs under the entire floor of the caldarium—the hot room of the baths—to circulate the hot air from the furnace. That’s how they heated the place. Narrow passages like that one, built in a network right from here to about where the school party was standing a few minutes ago. They’d just come in, as it were, from the street, through the palaestra, the games courts and exercise ground, and into the cold room. The chaps who wanted the cold plunge would undress and leave their things in lockers there, and there were two small cold basins to swim in—two here, anyhow—one on either side. The sybarites who wanted the hot water bath or the hot air bath would pass through into the slightly heated room one stage farther in, and undress there, then go on in to whichever they fancied. The hypocaust ran under both. If you were fond of hot water, you wallowed in a sunken basin. If you favoured sweating it out, you sat around on tiered benches and chatted with your friends until you started dissolving into steam, and then got yourself scraped down by a slave with a sort of sickle thing called a strigil, and massaged, and oiled and perfumed, or if you were a real fanatic you probably went straight from the hot room to take a cold plunge, like sauna addicts rolling in the snow. And then you were considered in a fit state to go and eat your dinner.’
    ‘By then,’ she said demurely, ‘I should think