Before us towered up the great walls of Shamantown, grey weathered stone, rising up for forty feet and more before jutting out into overhanging galleries, arrow-slitted through all their length. All round the grim walls ran a sheer rock crevice, in which--twenty feet below us--flowed a slow stream of sluggish, black, oily water. This precipitous moat was crossed at one point by a narrow bridge of natural rock, the one weak spot in an otherwise impregnable defence. On the far side of the bridge the entry-way ran in a narrow passage, flanked by loopholes, at whose end were the great gates of iron-shod timber, nowise different from the stone one we had seen in the _tangi_. But that place of death was now hidden from us by the stupendous wall of cliff under whose shelter nestled the Shaman stronghold. Lying in grotesque twisted attitudes about the farther end of the bridge and in the narrow passage were the bodies of some of the men Kyrlos had lost in his first efforts to storm his way in. The walls were crowned with tall catapults, and now and again a great stone or a shower of lighter stuff would crash past where Kyrlos, Andros, Wrexham, and I crouched in the shelter of a timber mantlet studying the entry. Or a long-shafted arrow would thud into the stout wood or stand quivering near by in the damp soil. Away, on either hand, reaching round to the cliffs that backed the city, was our long besieging line, breastwork and sentry’s shelter, catapult and wooden tower, with behind them the little tents and huts of Kyrlos’s army, for we had driven the Shamans to their lair, and ringed them with a ring of steel. Behind us, in all the twenty miles of jagged hill country that Wrexham and I, with his train of mysterious engineer stores, had traversed after crossing the fertile river plains beyond the Blue Sakae country, was no single Shaman, only the gaunt bands of outlaws and masterless men, and the raiding gangs of the Brown Sakae, who roved hither and thither pillaging what the Shamans had left. But these constituted no menace to us, and could be dealt with at leisure once the chief enemy had been crushed. We had ridden from Aornos a week before, and Aryenis’s dear farewells were still fresh in my memory, the last glimpse of her on her grey mare at the turning of the lane into the Aornos road, where she and I had ridden to await Wrexham’s party, still vivid to my mind. For two days afterward we had ridden steadily southwest, past the battle-field of the Astara with its heavy-winged vultures and jet-black ravens, past the frontier forts, over the ravaged fields and derelict villages into the maze of Shaman hills, where now and again upon some prominent peak we saw the glitter of steel in the little stone-ringed shelters, marking the detachments left by our people as they followed the retreating Shamans.