“Save your strength,” answered Aziel, “the range is too great, and presently you will have enough of shooting,” and he turned to talk to the officers of the guard.

CHAPTER XVI

THE CAGE OF DEATH

An hour later the attack commenced at chosen points of the double wall, one of them being the southern gate.  In front of the advancing columns of savages were driven vast numbers of slaves, many of whom had been captured, or had surrendered in the outer town.  These men were laden with faggots to fill the ditch, rude ladders wherewith to scale the walls, and heavy trunks of trees to be used in breaching them.  For the most part, they were unarmed, and protected only by their burdens, which they held before them as shields, and by the arrows of the warriors of Ithobal.  But these did little harm to the defenders, who were hidden behind the walls, whereas the shafts of the garrison, rained on them from above, killed or wounded the slaves by scores, who, poor creatures, when they turned to fly, were driven onward by the spear-points of the savages, to be slain in heaps like game in a pitfall.  Still, some of them lived, and running under the shelter of the wall, began to breach it with the rude battering rams, and to raise the scaling ladders till death found them, or they were worn out with excitement, fear and labour.

Then the real attack began.  With fierce yells, the threefold column rushed at the wall, and began to work the rams and scale the ladders, while the defenders above showered spears and arrows upon them, or crushed them with heavy stones, or poured upon their heads boiling pitch and water, heated in great cauldrons which stood at hand.

Time after time they were driven back with heavy loss; and, time upon time, fresh hordes of them advanced to the onslaught.  Thrice, at the southern gate, were the ladders raised, and thrice the stormers appeared above the level of the wall, to be hurled back, crushed and bleeding, to the earth beneath.

Thus the long day wore on and still the defenders held their own.

“We shall win,” shouted Aziel to Metem, as a fresh ladder was cast down with its weight of men to the death-strewn plain.

“Yes, here we shall win because we fight,” answered the Phoenician, “but elsewhere it may be otherwise.”  Indeed for a while the attack upon the south gate slackened.

Another hour passed and presently to the left of them rose a wild yell of triumph, and with it a shout of “Fly to the second wall.  The foe is in the fosse!”

Metem looked and there, down the great ditch, 300 paces to their left, a flood of savages poured towards them.  “Come,” he said, “the outer wall is lost.”  But as he spoke once more the ladders rose against the gates and flanking towers and once more Aziel sprang to cast them down.  When the deed was done, he looked behind him to find that he was cut off and surrounded.  Metem and most of his men indeed had gained the inner wall in safety, while he with twelve only of his bravest soldiers, Jews of his own following, who had stayed to help him to throw back the ladders, were left upon the gateway tower.  Nor was escape any longer possible, for both the plain without and the fosse within were filled with the men of Ithobal who advanced also by hundreds down the broad coping of the captured wall.