The assaulting party maintained its post until night, when it was relieved by fresh troops, and the five companies of the ROYAL SCOTS returned to their tents, which had been left standing at Neembolah; but Lieut.-Colonel Fraser remained in command of the troops at the pettah. At day-break on the 19th a heavy gun battery opened against the fort. At dusk in the evening a party of the enemy issued from the lower fort, crept unperceived down a deep ravine to the rear of the pettah, and gained the main street, where they encountered the British troops, and were repulsed and forced to abandon their enterprise. Lieut.-Colonel Fraser, of the ROYAL SCOTS, while in the act of gallantly encouraging the soldiers, and directing them to withhold their fire and give the enemy the bayonet, was shot in the head and fell dead on the spot: his body was afterwards conveyed to the camp at Neembolah and interred with military honours.[136] On the 21st of March the five companies of the ROYAL SCOTS took their turn of duty in the pettah, where they arrived a little before day-break. As soon as it was light a heavy gun battery opened on the forts with great effect, but it had only fired about a dozen rounds when, from some accident which could not be explained, the magazine in the rear of it, containing 130 barrels of gunpowder, exploded, killing a conductor of ordnance, a native officer, and 34 non-commissioned officers and rank and file, and wounding another native officer and 65 non-commissioned officers and rank and file. Such was the violence of the explosion that about six inches of the top of a bayonet was blown nearly six hundred yards from the battery. From this period until the 29th new batteries of heavy guns and mortars were erected, and, a breach having been effected in the wall of the lower fort, the enemy abandoned it and retired to the upper one: the lower fort was taken possession of on the morning of the 30th by part of Sir John Malcolm's division. The ROYAL SCOTS, with the remainder of the Hyderabad division, had in the meantime removed from their ground at Neembolah and occupied a position three miles north-east of the fortress. During the progress of constructing the new batteries on elevated and commanding situations, the dragging of ordnance into many of them was performed by the European soldiers, who literally worked like horses; and during the whole of the time they were annoyed by a constant fire of matchlocks from the walls of the upper fort, but which was too distant to prevent the execution of this herculean labour, which was performed with that ardour and cheerfulness so characteristic of British soldiers, when necessity demands any extraordinary exertions from them.