He wore a simple, dirty, and threadbare sagum, like any one of those Celtiberians who lay snoring in the tents roundabout, and, as a sign of command, there shone on his wrists two broad golden bracelets, which added strength by their confinement of the tendons and muscles of the arm. For more than a month he had been before the walls of Saguntum without achieving any advantage. He had spent the whole of that afternoon directing his engines of war without result, and now in his solitude this want of success irritated his nerves, and dispelled his sleep. The petted child of victory, he had conquered in open fight the most savage tribes of Iberia; he had dragged his elephants over the crests of lofty mountains, crossing rivers, breaking trails through forests, seeing warlike hordes fall prostrate before him as if he were a god, but now, for the first time in his life he encountered a stubborn enemy, which behind sheltering walls mocked at him and would not suffer him to advance a step. The city of merchants and farmers which he had studied from within, looking scornfully upon its opulence and effeminacy, threatened to break the current of his good luck, and, finding it indomitable, and reflecting upon his enemies in Carthage, upon the wrath of Rome, and realizing that time was passing while he was making no headway, the chieftain experienced a gust of anxiety. He had chosen well the vulnerable point of Saguntum. His engines of war were placed before the lower part of the city where the walls projected into the valley, upon an open, level plain, which permitted the advance of the battering-rams; but scarcely had the hundreds of naked men who dragged the heavy machines come within range than such a shower of arrows fell about them that those who were not pinned to the ground had to flee for their lives. Sometimes, under cover of the mantelets, which advanced on wheels, and through the loopholes of which the Carthaginian bowmen shot, they managed to get the battering-rams to the foot of the wall, but while that part of the city was the most exposed to attack, the ramparts which in the upper portion of Saguntum were of adobe had here a stony rock base, and in vain the bronze rams'-heads which formed the ends of the beams, pounded and pounded, operated by hundreds of arms. Showers of arrows and stones fell upon the besiegers, breaking the shields which covered them. A great tower dominated the whole area around the assailants, sowing death among them without exposure to the besieged, and not content with this, under the impulse of their passion, they frequently sprang forth from behind the ramparts, knifing the Carthaginians.