Mohammed, now convinced that a complete investment by sea and land was the condition of conquest, resolved to conquer nature herself. By means of the thousands of wood cutters and miners who followed his army, he caused to be levelled and planked in a few weeks a road for his galleys and ships over the hills and across the valleys into the Golden Horn. Over these "ways" which were well greased with ox-fat, a part of his fleet were drawn by cables and launched into the waters and anchored in the same bay with the Greek fleet and under the shelter of the Ottoman artillery. Then a hundred thousand men were employed in making from one bank to the other a bridge or causeway of sufficient breadth to permit one hundred men to march abreast to storm the bastions of the fort. Seven weeks of bombardment on the land side had at last opened four immense breaches upon the ruins of four towers. Only the moat of great width and thirty feet deep protected the assault of four hundred thousand men from the ten thousand combatants of Constantine that were extended along the walls for more than three miles. The Sultan was desirous of sparing the blood of his soldiers, now that the city lay at his mercy, of securing the Byzantine treasures as well and accordingly sent an envoy to appeal from the courage of the Emperor to the cowardice of the Greeks. The avarice of the Sultan might have been satisfied with the annual tribute of one hundred thousand ducats; but his ambition grasped the capital of the East. He guaranteed the Empire the absolute and independent sovereignty of the Peloponnesus, the property of all the inhabitants of Constantinople subject only to tribute if he would surrender. The reply was grandly heroic and stoical, not to say Christian. It was sad, hopeless, yet grand and dignified. He said that he would give thanks to God if Mohammed really inclined, in according him a sure and honorable peace, to spare his nation the catastrophes that weighed upon it. * * * That he was ready to discuss with the Sultan the conditions of a treaty as from prince to prince or even the conditions of a tribute of war imposed by the strong upon the weak:--but that no human force and no personal advantage would ever make him consent to give up to the enemy of the Christian name an empire and a capital, which he had sworn to his God, to his people and to himself, not to deliver, but with his life. These words, too noble, too elevated for the rest of Christian Europe were most irritating to the impatient Sultan who, guided by his favorite science of astrology, fixed on the twenty-ninth day of May as the fortunate and fatal hour.