Soon the fires of the burnt villages and towns smouldered and died out; and instead came the outposts of the terrible horde itself. Troops of Tartar horsemen dashed up to the walls of the city; little beardless brown men with long black hair, man and horse apparently grown into one, the riders waving their spears as they stood on the backs of their horses, or stooping underneath to pick up some dropped weapon; the man apparently an integral development of the horse, the horse not so much ridden as inspired and possessed by the man. Baithene, gazing at them for the first time from the walls, in the dusk of the evening, could not wonder at the rumours that they were not human at all, but the offspring of witches and demons. From time to time through the darkness came an unearthly combined yell, like the howl of a wild beast or malignant demon; and he crossed himself, thought of the exorcism in the baptismal service, and repeated his renunciation of the devil from the bottom of his heart. He had to watch through that night, and early in the first flush of the morning he saw that the horizon was dim with a great cloud of dust, whilst in the distance, through the silence of the dawn, was heard the grinding of huge wagon-wheels, with all the tumult of the movement of a vast multitude. Slowly the huge host gathered in from all sides, until the confused hum and murmur began to define itself into various sounds—the creaking of wheels, the cracking of whips, the lowing of oxen, the neighing of horses, the harsh voices of men, the shrill voices of women, even the wailing of babes; and through all the deep under-hum of an enormous mass of human beings in motion. The hearts of the men on the walls quailed with a weird terror; for through all came the unfamiliar cadences of wild foreign speech, with a sense that this living mass which was closing in around them with deadly purpose, to plunder and kill, to burn and to destroy, was pouring forth from the unknown boundless spaces of savage wildernesses, an interminable tide of destruction swelling up as from some unfathomable abyss of hell.