A terrible creaking drew near, mingled with the rhythm of hoarse voices singing together.

It was the great helepolis surrounded by a crowd of soldiers.  They were dragging it with both hands, hauling it with ropes, and pushing it with their shoulders,—­for the slope rising from the plain to the terrace, although extremely gentle, was found impracticable for machines of such prodigious weight.  However, it had eight wheels banded with iron, and it had been advancing slowly in this way since the morning, like a mountain raised upon another.  Then there appeared an immense ram issuing from its base.  The doors along the three fronts which faced the town fell down, and cuirassed soldiers appeared in the interior like pillars of iron.  Some might be seen climbing and descending the two staircases which crossed the stories.  Some were waiting to dart out as soon as the cramps of the doors touched the walls; in the middle of the upper platform the skeins of the ballistas were turning, and the great beam of the catapult was being lowered.

Hamilcar was at that moment standing upright on the roof of Melkarth.  He had calculated that it would come directly towards him, against what was the most invulnerable place in the wall, which was for that very reason denuded of sentries.  His slaves had for a long time been bringing leathern bottles along the roundway, where they had raised with clay two transverse partitions forming a sort of basin.  The water was flowing insensibly along the terrace, and strange to say, it seemed to cause Hamilcar no anxiety.

But when the helepolis was thirty paces off, he commanded planks to be placed over the streets between the houses from the cisterns to the rampart; and a file of people passed from hand to hand helmets and amphoras, which were emptied continually.  The Carthaginians, however, grew indignant at this waste of water.  The ram was demolishing the wall, when suddenly a fountain sprang forth from the disjointed stones.  Then the lofty brazen mass, nine stories high, which contained and engaged more than three thousand soldiers, began to rock gently like a ship.  In fact, the water, which had penetrated the terrace, had broken up the path before it; its wheels stuck in the mire; the head of Spendius, with distended cheeks blowing an ivory cornet, appeared between leathern curtains on the first story.  The great machine, as though convulsively upheaved, advanced perhaps ten paces; but the ground softened more and more, the mire reached to the axles, and the helepolis stopped, leaning over frightfully to one side.  The catapult rolled to the edge of the platform, and carried away by the weight of its beam, fell, shattering the lower stories beneath it.  The soldiers who were standing on the doors slipped into the abyss, or else held on to the extremities of the long beams, and by their weight increased the inclination of the helepolis, which was going to pieces with creakings in all its joints.