Then came the noise. It was neither a crash nor a roar, but a sustained rumbling bellow--as though Mother Earth herself were muttering at this desecration of her aged bones. Such was the power of that tremulous diapason that the forests shook and the hills trembled. Followed a moment of the silence of the pit, and then the clatter and spat of the débris as it showered the slopes and the forests. "Shields up!" shouted a tall zind of Ruthar, and the next moment he was stretched senseless by a fragment of rock because he had not been quick to obey his own order. Many others were injured, and some were killed. But what did a few deaths matter now? The Kimbrian Wall was down. For eighty feet the gap extended wide and free! And beyond lay Maeronica. In the forests and on the hills the companies cheered wildly as they saw the path the melinite had opened, and cheered again when they saw that the watchtower to the west had been shaken from its perch by the terrific concussion and lay a crumble of stonework at the foot of the wall. "Into the breach!" shouted Everson. "Through the wall!" From their lair on the hillsides the five thousand javelin bearers arose gleefully and crossed the space to the gap in the wall at a swinging trot, singing as they went. So clean had been the sweep of the melinite that it had torn away every vestige of the wall down to the living rock of the isthmus, leaving a wide trench or ditch, stone-bottomed and with sloping sides of earth, which it was an easy matter for the light-armed men to scramble across. But first the soldiers had to throw loose earth into the bottom of the trench; for the terrific pressure of the melinite against the rock had heated it until it was almost molten. For hundreds of feet around, heaps of earth and pulverized stone sent up columns of the greenish, acrid vapor of the explosive. On the heels of the javelin men pressed the engineers and road-men, swarming into the breach to fill the trench and make a way for the charioteers and the amalocs of Zoar, which were to follow. Along the screen of forest at the end of the road axes rang, and the trees began to fall. One of the first men into the breach after the skirmishers had crossed the ragged ditch, was Everson. With Mazoe, chief of his sappers, the lieutenant directed the work at the trench; for now was the time for haste. Shaken from their beds by the dull thunder of Everson's fireworks, Bel-Ar's steel riders at the eastern tower came clattering down their wall. Before ever they reached the gap, a trumpet sounded on the hillside, the archers and the slingers arose like wraiths from the forests, and the horsemen were met by a shower of shafts and stones that rattled and clanged on their armor and drove them back. * * * * *