Street fighting is always a savage business; in this labyrinth of lanes and passages and culs-de-sac it was terrible beyond description. Quarter was neither asked nor given. Women and children were slaughtered as remorselessly as the men. The streets were carpeted with dead and dying; their entrances were barricaded with cadavers; the pavements were slippery with blood; the waters of the harbor and the bay beyond were reddened by the sanguinary torrent which descended from the city’s gutters. Huge paving-stones, hurled by the improvised Carthaginian catapults, crashed into the Roman ranks, crushing their victims into masses of reeking, quivering flesh which resembled nothing human. War-elephants, trumpeting with rage and fear, tore through the teeming thoroughfares, trampling the soldiers underfoot or dashing their brains out against the walls of the buildings. From the housetops disheveled, wild-eyed women poured molten pitch upon the attackers, who shrieked in agony as the flesh was scalded from their bones. Other women, armed with knives, slipped from their hiding-places as the storming-columns passed to cut the throats of the wounded and to hideously mutilate them. Men fought breast to breast with swords and daggers and battle-axes and spears, and when these were shattered they used their naked hands, gouging their enemies’ eyeballs from their sockets, tearing out their throats, even biting each other to death like famished wolves. Hanging low over the stricken city was a dark pall of dust and smoke, beneath which the grim specters of lust and hatred went about their dreadful work. Women were raped in the presence of their dying husbands. Children were transfixed with spears or torn asunder before their mothers’ eyes. The priests were murdered on their own altars and sobbed out their lives at the feet of their gods. Houses were sacked and set aflame. The barbarian allies of the Romans, with their braided hair and painted bodies, flitted through the inferno, intent on loot and rapine, like creatures escaped from the Pit. The din of battle was terrific; the deep-throated roar of the charging legionaries, the answering war-cries of the defenders, the shrieks and groans of the wounded, the shrill imprecations of frenzied women, the wailing of terrified children, the trumpeting of the war-elephants, the clash and clang of metal, the thunderous concussion of the catapult stones, the twang of bowstrings, the whine of arrows, the sickening _plunk_ as they sank in human flesh—all these combined to make a hurricane of horrors, a very hell of sound.