than those which were brought to him at the close of that day.”[950] Saladin at once prepared for the siege which he now felt to be imminent. He ordered his captains to take up their appointed positions round the walls and make all ready for their defence, and he caused the brooks and pools round about the city to be polluted, the wells filled up, and the cisterns destroyed, so as to leave the assailants no means of obtaining water, for it would be impossible for them to dig new wells in that rocky soil. When all these precautions were taken, however, he was still very anxious; for he knew that among the Moslems, no less than among the Christians, there was dissension as to the conduct of the war, and jealousy and mutual distrust between the various nationalities of which his host was composed; for although the Sultan’s subjects were all lumped together indiscriminately by the Frank writers as “Turks” or “Saracens,” some of them were in reality much less closely akin and much less alike in origin, character, and habits, than were the men of England and France and Italy and Germany. On the night of Wednesday July 1 he called his emirs to a solemn council. By his desire Bohadin opened it with an impassioned exhortation to all present to persevere in the war, and proposed that they should all take an oath on the Sacred Stone of the Temple to hold together till death. Saladin himself appealed to them as “the only fighting force and sole stay of Islam,” on whom depended the safety of all Mussulmans everywhere. They all pledged themselves to stand by him till death. [Sidenote: _Thurs., July 2_] Next day, however, they held a meeting among themselves, and some of them there expressed their disapproval of the Sultan’s strategy in shutting up “the only fighting force and stay of Islam” at Jerusalem; they believed it would result in the capture of the city and the destruction of the army by a fate such as that of the garrison of Acre, and thus bring the Mussulman dominion in Palestine to ruin, and that the wiser course would be to risk a pitched battle, which if they were victorious would shatter the enemy’s power and enable the Moslems to recover all that they had lost, while if they were defeated, they would indeed lose Jerusalem, but the army of Islam would remain, and might hope to regain the city hereafter. These criticisms were reported to Saladin, with a further warning that if he persisted in his plan of defence, he must either himself remain in the city or leave one of his family to take the command there, as the Kurdish troops would not obey a Turkish emir nor the Turks a Kurdish one. Personally he was willing to stay, but his friends would not sanction a course which they felt might bring upon Islam a double disaster in the loss of the city and the Sultan both [Sidenote: _July 2_] at once. He and his devoted secretary spent the whole night in deliberating and praying over the problems suggested