After we had come up through the steep mountains, the slippery valleys, the dewy turf and the cloddy fields, riding a pure white horse of the country (and he too was by now quite tired), I jump down onto my feet, so that I too might shake off the stiffness of sitting by the stir of walking.

The ride is told in four matching pairs, each a neuter plural adjective with a genitive: ardua montium, lubrica vallium, roscida cespitum, glebosa camporum, “the steeps of mountains, the slippery of valleys, the dewy of turf, the cloddy of fields.” The pattern turns a day’s journey into a list that moves like riding: up, down, wet, rough. Lewis & Short has two examples of glaebosus, “cloddy”: this sentence and one in Pliny. Its only example of vegetatio, “a quickening,” is the vegetatione incessus of this sentence, and it gives sedentarius with this fatigatio, “fatigue from sitting.” Helm’s text here differs from the one most translations follow. The manuscripts read emersi me, which does not construe. Helm prints Friedrich Leo’s correction, emersimus, “we had come up through,” with the “we” the narrator uses for himself; the Loeb text prints Hildebrand’s emensi, me. Helm also keeps iam, “by now,” before the tired horse, a word the Loeb text as printed by Perseus does not have.