for him; and when he thoroughly understood the character of the site and surroundings of the city, he pronounced them such as to make the city, in his opinion, virtually impregnable “so long”—thus the Arab reports the words of the western king—“as Saladin lives and the Moslems are united.”[846] Before the middle of January the host was back at Ramlah.[847] Whether Richard’s verdict on the prospects of the Crusade was really quite so pessimistic as Ibn Alathyr represents may be doubted. The scheme now proposed by the Military Orders and accepted by the king was simply a reversion to the original plan of campaign with which they had all set out from Acre, and from which Saladin’s seeming panic after Arsuf had tempted them to diverge; and there can be little doubt that the divergence was unwise. The Frank pilgrim-chroniclers, sharing and voicing the disappointment of the rank and file, declare indeed that the retirement from Beit Nuba was a blunder, and that if their leaders had but known the evil plight—due, like their own, to the weather—of Saladin and his men at Jerusalem, the city might, “without doubt,” have been taken easily.[848] But those who spoke thus could have no real knowledge as to the state of affairs in Jerusalem, and their version of it finds no countenance in the pages of Bohadin, who was there, and who may fairly be trusted on the subject, since he makes no mystery about the Sultan’s perils and alarms on other occasions. The picture drawn by the very same Frankish chroniclers of the condition in which the host, “doleful and down-hearted,” marched back to Ramlah shows that it was quite unfit to attempt an invasion of the hill-country. Men and beasts were alike worn out with weakness and fever, caused by the wet and cold, and many of the “lesser folk,” sick and helpless, would have been left behind but for King Richard, who caused them to be sought out and brought away in safety.[849] Among the French Crusaders discontent took the form of wholesale desertion. Some went to Joppa; of these, some stayed there, and others sailed back to Acre, “where living was not dear,” sarcastically observes the Norman poet; some joined the marquis at Tyre, whither he had long been trying to entice them; the duke of Burgundy himself went off in dudgeon with his followers to Casal of the Plains. Extremely angry, but nothing daunted, Richard and the faithful remnant of the host set out on January 19 by a road which, crossing the plain from Ramlah, brought them back at Ibelin[850] to the main road along the coast. The ten miles’ march through mud and mire to Ibelin was a sufficiently [Sidenote: _Jan. 20_] hard day’s work; but “that day was nothing compared to the next,” when nearly double that distance had to be covered, on a road where men and horses were constantly sinking into swamps, and beneath a ceaseless downpour of rain, hail and snow; and when at length they arrived before Ascalon, they could only make