Meantime, the great army of the Crusaders was pressing on. For the moment it was unmolested. Both Christian and Saracen had begun to conceive a respect for each other’s prowess. The latter found that his innumerable troops of light cavalry were of little use against the heavily-armed and disciplined masses of the Crusaders: while these, harassed by the perpetual renewal of armies which seemed only destroyed to spring again from the earth, and convinced now that the recovery of the Holy City would be no holiday ramble in a sunny land, marched with better discipline and more circumspection. But the Saracens, unable to raise another army in time, fled before them, leaving towns and villages unoccupied. The Christians burnt the mosques, and plundered the country. Even the passes of Mount Taurus were left unguarded, and the Christian army passed through defiles and valleys, where a very small force might have barred the passage for the whole army. They suffered, however, from their constant enemies, heat and thirst. On one mountain, called the “Mountain of the Devil,” the army had to pass along a path so narrow that the horses were led, and the men could not walk two abreast. Here, wearied with the ascent, faint with thirst, hundreds sank, unable to proceed, or fell over the precipices. It was the last of the cruel trials through which they were to pass before they reached the land of their pilgrimage. From the summit of the last pass, they beheld, stretched out at their feet, the fair land of Syria. Covered with ruins, as it was—those ruins which exist to the present day—and devastated by so many successive wars, nothing had been able to ruin the fertility of the soil; and after the arid plains through which they had passed, no wonder the worn and weary soldiers rejoiced and thanked God aloud, when they saw at last the very country to which they were journeying. The ordeal of thirst and heat had been passed through, and their numbers were yet strong. Nothing now remained, as they fondly thought, but to press on, and fight the enemy before the very walls of Jerusalem. The successes of Tancred cleared the way for the advance of the main army. Nothing interposed to stop them; provisions were plentiful, and their march was unimpeded by any enemy. Count Robert of Flanders led the advance corps. At Artasia, a town about a day’s march from Antioch, the gates were thrown open to them; and though the garrison of Antioch threw out flying squadrons of cavalry, they were not able to check the advance of the army, which swarmed along the roads, in numbers reduced, indeed, by one half, from the six hundred thousand who gathered before Nicæa, but still irresistible. The old bridge of stone which crossed the Orontes was stormed, and the Crusaders were fairly in Syria, and before Antioch.