and dead, until at length a shrill, wild call from a thousand Ottoman trumpets, heard above the din of battle, sounds the retreat, and the great vanguard, bleeding, exhausted, and reduced to half its number, draws off from the entire length of the walls in an unsteady, wavering line. Then Muhammad gives the signal for a general assault, and at that sign three mighty armies, three great rivers of men, start into motion, advance, spread out, cover the heights, overflow the valleys, and amid the flashing of swords and waving of banners, the din and clangor of drums and trumpets, sweep against those doomed walls with a shock like that of a tempestuous ocean beating against a rock-bound shore, while the savage cry, uttered as with one voice from all that vast multitude of powerful throats, “_La Ilah illa lah!_” echoes like a thunder-clap from the Golden Horn to the Castle of the Seven Towers. Then the great battle really begins, or rather a hundred different battles, carried on before every gate, at every breach, in the ditches, from the bastions, at the foot of the curtains. From one end to the other of Constantinople’s mighty ramparts ten thousand bastions pour down death and destruction upon two hundred thousand human beings; rocks, beams, casks filled with earth, and burning faggots are hurled from tower and curtain. Ladders laden with men give way, the high bridges of the attacking towers fall in, catapults take fire; host after host hurls itself forward, wavers, and falls back upon heaps of stone, piles of human bodies, the drawn weapons of comrades, the dying and wounded; here and there the thick clouds of smoke are lighted up by vivid flames of Greek fire, while the air is rent with the shrieks of the injured, whistles of cannon-balls, explosions from the mines, and the forbidding roar of Muhammad’s eighteen batteries, which command the city from the neighboring heights. Occasionally there comes a momentary hush, as though the opposing forces had paused for breath: as the smoke clears away glimpses can be caught through the great breach near the San Romano Gate of Constantine’s crimson mantle, or the flashing arms of Gustinian and Francesco di Toledo, or the terrible forms of the three hundred Genoese archers; and at that sight the battle is resumed with renewed fury. The smoke, rolling down in thick clouds, again conceals the breach, ladders are flung against the walls, fresh torrents of missiles pour from the defences, and the dead are piled in heaps before the Adrianopolis and Golden, the Selymbria, the Tou Tritou, the Pempton, Rusion, Blachernæ, and Heptapyrgion gates, while legion after legion of armed men, rising as it were out of the very earth, beat against the walls, pour over the moat, surmount the outer ramparts, fall, rise again, dragging themselves up by loosened stones, climbing over dead bodies, through clouds of arrows, beneath hailstorms of stones, in girdles of flame, until at length, decimated and spent,