Euphobias the philosopher, who remained idle in spite of the insults of those who worked, ironically recalled the memory of the primitive founders of the city, the Cyclopes who moved stones as big as mountains and had thrown up the base of the Acropolis. The labor was not finished until the next afternoon, and at the same moment the besieging army began to stir. It marched solidly to the assault, silently, sullenly, revealing the fixed determination of taking possession at the first onset of that breach which had put them to shame the day before. They passed through the clouds of stones and arrows which the besieged hurled at them, and the cohorts leading on a run climbed up the pile of débris, struggling with the more audacious Saguntines, who still disputed passage through the breach. After a short conflict the besiegers made themselves masters of the entrance to the city, and they burst into exclamations of triumph. Hannibal marched intrepidly at the head of his soldiers; but on gaining the crest of the pile in the breach he stepped backward with an expression of disgust. Before him stretched a broad waste of demolished houses, and beyond the hills of débris rose a second monstrous wall, constructed in haste, as if an enormous broom had swept the desolated structures of the interior to the entrance of the city. Great, square-hewn stones, chunks of masonry, broken columns, were laid with the regularity of blocks in a wall, and the interstices were chinked with fresh clay. This wall quickly raised by a supreme effort of the whole city was taller than the previous one, and in the form of a curve it joined with the two curtains of the ancient walls which were still standing. Hannibal paled with wrath on seeing that all his efforts had served only to make him master of a pitiful little piece of ground covered by heaps of ruins and that by prodigious skill the walls which he had battered down had risen again beyond in a single night. Saguntum would destroy her houses to refortify herself with new barriers, cutting off his passage! He would have to conquer the ground inch by inch, street by street, and it might cost him months and years to narrow it down, first around the Forum, then up to the hill of the Acropolis, before he could succeed in making it surrender. On the summit of their new wall the Saguntines showed themselves as resolute as the day before, and their bows and slings prevented the assault of the enemy, who ended by falling back, remaining under cover of the débris at the breach.