and every movement they made was a leap in the dark.
First, on the one side, we have Tancred trying to
take the whole fortified city by climbing up a single
slender ladder, as if a man tried to lasso the peak
of a mountain. Then we have the flinging from
the turrets of a strange and frightful fiery rain,
as if water itself had caught fire. It was afterwards
known as the Greek Fire and was probably petroleum;
but to those who had never seen (or felt) it before
it may well have seemed the flaming oil of witchcraft.
Then Godfrey and the wiser of the warriors set about
to build wooden siege-towers and found they had next
to no wood to build them. There was scarcely
anything in that rocky waste but the dwarf trees of
olive; a poetic fantasy woven about that war in after
ages described them as hindered even in their wood-cutting
by the demons of that weird place. And indeed
the fancy had an essential truth, for the very nature
of the land fought against them; and each of those
dwarf trees, hard and hollow and twisted, may well
have seemed like a grinning goblin. It is said
that they found timbers by accident in a cavern; they
tore down the beams from ruined houses; at last they
got into touch with some craftsmen from Genoa who
went to work more successfully; skinning the cattle,
who had died in heaps, and covering the timbers.
They built three high towers on rollers, and men and
beasts dragged them heavily against the high towers
of the city. The catapults of the city answered
them, the cataracts of devouring fire came down; the
wooden towers swayed and tottered, and two of them
suddenly stuck motionless and useless. And as
the darkness fell a great flare must have told them
that the third and last was in flames.
All that night Godfrey was toiling to retrieve the
disaster. He took down the whole tower from where
it stood and raised it again on the high ground to
the north of the city which is now marked by the pine
tree that grows outside Herod’s gate. And
all the time he toiled, it was said, sinister sorcerers
sat upon the battlements, working unknown marvels
for the undoing of the labour of man. If the
great knight had a touch of such symbolism on his
own side, he might have seen in his own strife with
the solid timber something of the craft that had surrounded
the birth of his creed, and the sacred trade of the
carpenter. And indeed the very pattern of all
carpentry is cruciform, and there is something more
than an accident in the allegory. The transverse
position of the timber does indeed involve many of
those mathematical that are analogous to moral truths
and almost every structural shape has the shadow of
the mystic rood, as the three dimensions have a shadow
of the Trinity. Here is the true mystery of equality;
since the longer beam might lengthen itself to infinity,
and never be nearer to the symbolic shape without
the help of the shorter. Here is that war and
wedding between two contrary forces, resisting and