Here to the Wells of Sepphoris they came, then, from all the points of the Holy Land, riding in; and that great fragment of the True Cross, the standard of the Crusades, was sent to be the heart of the host in this last trial. So they gathered. Meanwhile the mighty instrument which threatened them was gathering too. Saladin, who had earlier been south in the desert, in the dark hills beyond the Dead Sea, had come back north. He had summoned all his troops from as far as the Tigris, and the Orontes, and the borders of Egypt. Twelve thousand of the knights alone--that is, of men who held rank by what the Christians would have called “noble tenure”--were in his muster; with, perhaps, six or seven or ten times as many--an unknown multitude--of lesser soldiers eager for “Allah’s road”; the holy business of uprooting the Nazarenes: that is, ourselves; Europe; Christendom. Saladin also had his gathering-place--Ashtaroth, on the great pilgrims’ road in the Hauran, two days’ march east of Jordan, four days’ from Damascus. Thence going a few miles northward (much to where the station of Tesil now stands on the Damascus railway) he reviewed that vast host of varied men. It was a Friday, the holy day of the Moslem week, on which day the great fanatic loved to begin an enterprise--Friday, the 26th of June, 1187, the fourteenth day of the month of Rabi-el-Aker, in the five hundred and eighty-third year of the Hegira. On that same day, at the hour of public prayer, he began his march, and, going far, encamped his army that night where his son’s cavalry had stood two months before in the plain to the east of Jordan, just south of the Sea of Galilee. There for a space he halted. His scouts and spies went cautiously westward over the burnt fields and stubble of the blazing summer for news, and brought back the numbers and names of this gathering of the Christian host at the Wells of Sepphoris. Saladin took counsel with his captains, and it was determined to provoke immediate action, for the superiority of the Moslems was very great. Upon Monday, the 29th, the host crossed Jordan and entered Galilee, camping immediately upon the hither bank, and making no true march that day. But upon the 30th they advanced westward some seven miles on to the higher land, and stood at Kefr Sabt, astride the direct way between Nazareth and Tiberias, ten miles or so to the east of the Christian camp at Sepphoris. The Christian host did not move.