night of noon
He was to learn it again in later years , as an additional bitterness in the humiliation of defeat ; and find out , as does many a man , that if he once fall , or seem to fall , a hundred curs spring up to bark at him , who dared not open their mouths while he was on his legs . So they rode into the forest , and parted , each with his footman and his dogs , in search of boar and deer ; and each had his sport without meeting again for some two hours or more . Hereward and Martin came at last to a narrow gully , a murderous place enough . Huge fir-trees roofed it in , and made a night of noon . High banks of earth and great boulders walled it in right and left for twenty feet above . The track , what with pack-horses ' feet , and what with the wear and tear of five hundred years ' rain-fall , was a rut three feet deep and two feet broad , in which no horse could turn . Any other day Hereward would have cantered down it with merely a tightened rein .