to it, without a thought of combined action or of manoeuvres.  One of the enemy’s vessels is represented as capsized and sinking; the rest continue the engagement.  Several are pressing towards the shore of the lagoon, and the men-at-arms on board them are endeavouring to effect a landing; but they are met by the land-force under Ramesses himself, who greet them with such a hail of arrows as renders it impossible for them to carry out their purpose.

[Illustration:  SEA-FIGHT IN THE TIME OF RAMESSES III.]

It would seem that Ramesses had no sooner defeated and destroyed the army of the Purusata and Tekaru than he set off in haste for Pelusium, and marched with such speed as to arrive in time to witness the naval engagement, and even to take a certain part in it.  The invading fleet was so far successful as to force its way through the opposing vessels of the Egyptians, and to press forward towards the shore; but here its further progress was arrested.  “A wall of iron,” says Ramesses, “shut them in upon the lake,” The best troops of Egypt lined the banks of the lagoon, and wherever the invaders attempted to land they were foiled.  Repulsed, dashed to the ground, hewn down or shot down at the edge of the water, they were slain “by hundreds of heaps of corpses.”  “The infantry,” says the monarch in his vainglorious inscription, set up in memory of the event, “all the choicest troops of the army of Egypt, stood upon the bank, furious as roaring lions; the chariot force, selected from among the heroes that were quickest in battle, was led by officers confident in themselves.  The war-steeds quivered in all their limbs, and burned to trample the nations under their feet.  I myself was like the god Mentu, the warlike; I placed myself at their head, and they saw the achievements of my hands.  I, Ramesses the king, behaved as a hero who knows his worth, and who stretches out his arm over his people in the day of combat.  The invaders of my territory will gather no more harvests upon the earth, their life is counted to them as eternity.  Those that gained the shore, I caused to fall at the water’s edge, they lay slain in heaps; I overturned their vessels; all their goods sank In the waves.”  After a brief combat, all resistance ceased.  The empty ships, floating at random upon the still waters of the lagoon, or stuck fast in the Nile mud, became the prize of the victors, and were found to contain a rich booty.  Thus ended this remarkable struggle, in which nations widely severed and of various bloods—­scarcely, as one would have thought, known to each other, and separated by a diversity of interests—­united in an attack upon the foremost power of the known world, traversed several hundreds of miles of land or sea successfully, neither quarrelling among themselves nor meeting with disaster from without, and reached the country which they had hoped to conquer, but were there completely defeated and repulsed in two engagements—­one by land, the other partly by land and partly by sea—­so that “their spirit was annihilated, their soul was taken from them.”  Henceforth no one of the nations which took part in the combined attack is found in arms against the power that had read them so severe a lesson.