The Christian men came in their dense columns over the bridge where the rivers join. They poured into that peninsula; they also fixed their camp from stream to stream, and their great body of heavier horses, and their weapons, which were not spears nor scimitars, but the long sword and the long shield and the battle-axe; and they were summoned to the sound of horns and of great oliphants. Now one day passed and another, and nothing was done; but at night each of the hosts could see the fires of the other, murky in the damp autumn weather, red against the low mists; and every morning, as the late sun rose beyond the valley of the Vienne over the damp fields of October through the fogs, the northern men heard the Arab call to prayer, shrill and singing, and the challenge to their faith and their name. And the Arabs could also see, far off across the space that divided them, men differently habited from the soldiers of Charles. They knew them well, for Spain was full of them. They were the priests. So one day passed, and another and another, and yet no battle was joined; until at last a week had passed, and it was Saturday. Upon that morning, then, the leader of the Mahommedans, looking northward again to see what the camp of his enemies did, saw it covered all along its front by one packed line, dense, and cramped together as a faggot is cramped in its bond, all facing southward and hiding the tents behind with their line: for this was the army of Charles, now drawn up for battle. There was a southern man, a Spaniard, who saw that sight, and who said that the men of the north were frozen men--men fixed by the cold with frozen faces, and he said that so standing all in line, not moving at all, they seemed to be a wall. Then, before such a sight, the Arab army moved and swirled; there was the saddling of horses and the calling of the companies together with the shrill tube, and the words of the East cried from one to another, and accoutrement upon every side, until the light horses and their white-cloaked riders were ready, some with the thin lance levelled, some with the bared scimitar in hand, for the charge; and among them many wore mail, fine and closely linked, and iron upon their heads. But all were mounted for speed and for the rapid turning of a horse this way and that. The line charged. You might have seen the breaking of the white cloaks against those tall northern men, like the breaking of waves against a ridge of rock that bounds the sea. And when from that first charge they rode back, leaving the line unbroken, then one could see, scattered everywhere before that line, the bodies of men fallen, and of horses which the battle-axe had felled.