Round the Pharaoh himself, as he stood in his beautiful chariot, marched the royal bodyguard. It was made up of men whom the Egyptians called "Sherden"--Sardinians, probably, who had come over the sea to serve for hire in the army of the great King. They wore metal helmets, with a round ball on the top and horns at the sides, carried round bossed shields, and were armed with great heavy swords of much the same shape as those which the Norman knights used to carry. Behind the native troops and the bodyguard marched the other mercenaries--regiments of black Soudanese, with wild-beast skins thrown over their ebony shoulders; and light-coloured Libyans from the West, each with a couple of feathers stuck in his leather skull-cap. Scouts went on ahead to scour the country, and bring to the King reports of the enemy's whereabouts. Beside the royal chariot there padded along a strange, but very useful soldier--a great tame lion, which had been trained to guard his master and fight with teeth and claws against his enemies. Last of all came the transport train, with the baggage carried on the backs of a long line of donkeys, and protected by a baggage-guard. The Egyptians were good marchers, and even in the hot Syrian sunshine, and across a rough country where roads were almost unknown, they could keep up a steady fifteen miles a day for a week on end without being fagged out. Let us follow the fortunes of an Egyptian soldier through one of the great battles of the nation's history. Menna was one of the most skilful charioteers of the whole Egyptian army--so skilful that, though he was still quite young, he was promoted to be driver of the royal war-chariot when King Ramses II. marched out from Zaru, the frontier garrison town of Egypt, to fight with the Hittites in Northern Syria. During all the long march across the desert, through Palestine, and over the northern mountain passes, no enemy was seen at all, and, though Menna was kept busy enough attending to his horses and seeing that the chariot was in perfect order, he was in no danger. But as the army began to wind down the long valley of the Orontes towards the town of Kadesh, the scouts were kept out in every direction, and the whole host was anxiously on the lookout for the Hittite troops. Kadesh came in sight at last. Far on the horizon its towers could be seen, and the sun's rays sparkled on the river and on the broad moat which surrounded the walls; but still no enemy was to be seen. The scouts came in with the report that the Hittites had retreated northwards in terror, and King Ramses imagined that Kadesh was going to fall into his hands without a battle. His army was divided into four brigades, and he himself hurried on rather rashly with the first brigade, leaving the other three to straggle on behind him, widely separated from one another (Plate 4).