Some of the very lombards employed in the attack on Baeza can still be seen in that city, constructed of thick bars of iron clamped together by rings of the same metal; while in the fields around the peasants dig up balls of iron and marble, that once made such havoc of the ramparts. Beside a modern field-gun these cannon appear ludicrously clumsy. Fixed so that they could be pointed neither to the right nor left, without changing the position of the whole machine, and built only to fire horizontally, the weight of their ammunition prevented the powder used from igniting quickly; yet compared with the artillery of bygone days their discharge had the swiftness of the wind. When two lombards could arrive between them at one hundred and forty shots within the day, their gunners could proclaim a marvellous achievement; and Isabel looking round on her formidable batteries could boast, as Prescott has complimented her, on having “assembled a train of artillery, such as was probably not possessed at that time by any other European potentate.” The kingdom of Granada, regardless of her enemy’s heavy guns, still kept her derisive smile. Fatal to the most solid masonry these lombards might prove indeed, when once in action, but who should bring them by river-bed and goat-track to assault fortresses and castles built on crags, that had hitherto defied the approach even of a battering-ram? It was a question that might have dismayed the most intrepid of generals; but Isabel was of the fibre of which Hannibals and Napoleons are made. She recognized difficulties but to overcome them; and the actual provision of guns was merely a section of her extensive preparations. Carpenters, blacksmiths, stone-masons, bricklayers, colliers, weavers of ropes and baskets; these were but a few of the army of workmen and engineers who built bridges, filled in valleys, and levelled heights, that the artillery might reach their destination. At the head of each department was an official deputed to see that nothing was lacking to his branch of the work, whether food for the troops, fodder for the horses, wood for carts and bridges, forges for iron-moulding, powder fetched from Sicily, Flanders, or Portugal, or marble and stone to be fashioned into shot. In the end two thousand gun-carriages, drawn by oxen, lumbered heavily across the frontier, and soon were winding up the mountains into the heart of Granada by peak and ridge. Pulgar describes how a road more than three leagues in length was constructed within twelve days “by the command and great insistence of the Queen”; while the Curate of Los Palacios, lost in awe and admiration, declares that “he who had not seen the passes by which those monstrous lombards and heavy artillery made their way would have deemed it a thing incredible.”