From that moment the fortune of battle changes. In vain does Pelistes, forgetting his grief, lead on such as would follow him. For the first time his voice falls on deaf ears. In vain Teodomir endeavours to rally his veterans. In vain Roderich on his war-horse, grasps sword and buckler, to reform his flying troops. Surrounded and assailed by his own treacherous subjects, his sword flies like lightning round his homed casque, each stroke felling an enemy. Around him the fight thickens. “A kingdom for his head,” cries the voice of Julian, pressing closer and closer with his perjured band. [Illustration: A VIEW OF MECCA IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.] A mortal panic falls on the Christians. Not only do they not fight, but they throw away their arms and fly! For three whole days the Bedouins and Berbers, the fleetest riders among the Africans, pursue the flying Goths over the plains. But few of that vast host live to tell the tale. Alone, with a compact body of men, Teodomir manages to escape into the East, and Pelistes, carrying the body of his son, shuts himself up behind the walls of Cordoba. And Roderich? The Christian chronicler who furnishes these details records that the king fell by the sword of Julian, but this is too much of a monkish morality to be true. It is said that Orelia, stained with blood and disabled, was found entangled in a marsh on the borders of the Guadalete, the sandals and mantle of her master beside her. But where history is silent romancers take up the tale, in those same ballads, parodied by Cervantes, in the inimitable scene of the puppets, in the second part of Don Quixote, when Master Peter, representing Roderich’s tragic death, grows alarmed at the Don’s frantic wrath, and his drawn sword, and cries, “Hold! hold! These are no real Berbers and Moors, but harmless dolls of pasteboard, picturing unhappy King Roderich, who said, ‘Yesterday I was lord of Spain, and to-day I have not a foot of land which I can call my own. Not half an hour ago I had knights and empire at my command, horses in abundance, and chests and bags of gold, but now you see me a ruined and undone man!’”