Their armament was stronger too. All the Saracen munitionment was carefully distributed for a certain victory. The camels, with their loads of arrows, were ranged behind the archers, and there was a great reserve as well. It is true that, had the Christian army been by some miracle in condition for strong action, the Sultan’s position was very perilous. He was right on the lake, with very steep falling land only a few hundred yards behind him, and his only road of retreat passed just behind the fronts of the two armies. If those fronts shifted in his disfavour, if his light men broke at the shock of the heavier Franks, that road would be cut. Whether the unfavourable position weighed with him or no, whether he had fully gauged the breakdown of what was now before him, we cannot tell. He seems, up to the very end of the fight, to have had some doubt, tugging nervously at his beard and saying, “It was not yet over!” The historian, with both conditions before him, and knowing what exhaustion now weighed upon the Christians, can have none. It was again, though on a much larger scale, in that same formation of a shallow crescent, that the heart of the Moslem force--that in front of the head of the Christian host under Raymond--was drawn up. It did not at once attack, perhaps depending upon the sun and the heat as allies; and when it did so, it opened with a violent discharge of arrows. The effect of this was clinched by a general advance of the whole Mahommedan line at the charge. It caught and gripped the Christian body, separated its units, reduced the battle to a great mêlée, in which numbers, a better order, and--far more important than everything else--_condition_, were wholly upon the side of the enemy. There is no plan possible of this surging business, for no scheme was necessary or attempted. It was a cutting off of large isolated bodies, a cutting down of smaller ones, and a quantity of hand-to-hand fighting between men refreshed and men maddened by thirst; and for the most part the Christian infantry that followed the Christian knights was already in the mood for surrender, or even for accepting death. Raymond, Count of Tripoli, with his knights, charged at the king’s command right forward into the press. He found against him the Sultan’s nephew, who opened his ranks and closed them after the small body of knights had crashed through. Raymond found himself with his companions cut off far forward. He hacked his way out through the mass of the Arab horses, and rode with his few companions straight for Tyre. There fell upon him a stupor, and later a frenzy, to see Christendom thus ruined. In a few weeks he was dead.