Meanwhile Richard’s fleet had arrived, bringing the rest of his followers[671] and his engines of war. These seem to have been mostly stone-casters and other missile engines worked at long range. Philip’s machines were chiefly engines of assault and battery, which had to be advanced close up to the walls, and were thus more exposed to damage and destruction by fire from the enemy. The most effectual work of all was that of the miners who had long been making their way under the walls and especially under the “Accursed Tower.”[672] The defences of Acre were now crumbling fast, and the fall of a long piece of wall close to that tower, on July 3,[673] coinciding with the failure of an attack made by Saladin and his brother on the Christian trenches,[674] was [Sidenote: _July 4_] followed next morning by an offer from the garrison to surrender the place and all its contents if their own lives and liberty were spared.[675] The two kings, knowing that the garrison comprised—as a Moslem writer says—“the best emirs of the Sultan’s host and the bravest champions of Islam,”[676] refused the condition.[677] That night another attack on the Christians’ outer trench was successfully beaten off.[678] Then Richard, sick though he was, determined to try the effect of an assault on the city under his own personal direction. He caused a kind of moveable hurdle-shed, called by the French writers _cercloie_ or _circleie_, to be brought up to the edge of the fosse; under cover of this shelter his crossbowmen could shoot at the tower; he himself, wrapped in a rich silken quilt, was carried forth and placed among them, “and many a bolt was shot by that skilful hand,” the Turks shooting back all the time.[679] All day long his stone-casters worked incessantly; so did his miners; at night the mine was fired, and their efforts were rewarded by the fall of some turrets and a great breach in the curtain wall.[680] Hereupon Richard sent a crier through the host to proclaim a reward for any man who would pull out a stone from a certain piece of wall close to the great tower. The offer met with a quick response from his own troops and the Pisans, and before the rest of the host had finished [Sidenote: _July 6_] breakfast next morning they had nearly made an entrance into the city,[681] when the besieged again signified their desire to treat for peace.[682] Again the two emirs in command, Karakoush and Seiffeddin-el-Meshtoub,[683] came to speak with the kings, and again their offers were refused, seemingly on the understanding that the matter was to be referred to Saladin.[684]