The defenders were as numerous as the assailants, and for six weeks they had been labouring on their well-contrived castles; but strong and valiant in arms must the soldiers have been who stood in that hour before the veterans of the forty-third. One French grenadier officer only dared to sustain the rush. Standing alone on the high wall of the first castle and flinging large stones with both his hands, a noble figure, he fought to the last and fell, while his men shrinking on each side sought safety among the rocks on his flanks. Close and confused then was the action, man met man at every turn, but with a rattling fire of musketry, sometimes struggling in the intricate narrow paths sometimes climbing the loose stone walls, the British soldiers won their desperate way until they had carried the second castle, called by the French the place of arms, and the magpie’s nest, because of a lofty pillar of rock which rose above it and on which a few marksmen were perched. From these points the defenders were driven into their last castle, which being higher and larger than the others and covered by a natural ditch or cleft in the rocks, fifteen feet deep, was called the Donjon. Here they made a stand, and the assailants, having advanced so far as to look into the rear of the rampart and star fort on the table-land below, suspended the vehement throng of their attack for a while, partly to gather a head for storming the Donjon, partly to fire on the enemy beneath them, who were now warmly engaged with the two battalions of riflemen, the Portuguese Caçadores, and the seventeenth Portuguese. This last regiment was to have followed the forty-third but seeing how rapidly and surely the latter were carrying the rocks, had moved at once against the traverse on the other side of the marsh; and very soon the French defending the rampart, being thus pressed in front, and warned by the direction of the fire that they were turned on the ridge above, seeing also the fifty-second, forming the extreme left of the division, now emerging from the deep ravine beyond the star fort on the other flank, abandoned their works. Then the forty-third gathering a strong head stormed the Donjon. Some leaped with a shout down the deep cleft in the rock, others turned it by the narrow paths on each flank, and the enemy abandoned the loose walls at the moment they were being scaled. Thus in twenty minutes six hundred old soldiers were hustled out of this labyrinth; yet not so easily but that the victors lost eleven officers and sixty-seven men.