Like Columbus, Pisani saw himself on the very verge of losing the result of all his labour, for lack of a little more trust on the part of his men. To keep them by force was impossible, for they themselves were the male population of Venice, and for the time being they held good and evil in their hands. Even the senators and other nobles murmured at being obliged [Illustration: RIO S. POLO] to keep at sea, and often under fire, because the Doge had rashly sworn a solemn oath to remain. On the thirtieth of December Pisani was driven to such extremities as to be forced to promise that unless Carlo Zeno appeared in forty-eight hours the fleet should return to the Lido, in spite of the Doge and his vow. There was no reason at all why Zeno should be expected; it was a mere empty promise, but it gained time; something could still be done in two days and two nights. He laboured and fought on, and the short limit of time expired with the dawn of New Year’s Day. Zeno had not come, and Pisani’s men would not stay another hour. By his promise he must let them go, and it needed not his wisdom to foresee that their defection meant the fall of Venice, the end of the Republic, the general destruction of the insensate population themselves with all they had. It was of little use to have been their idol for years and their victorious dictator for ten days, if they could not bear a little cold and a little hardship for his sake. The day rose wearily for Pisani. [Sidenote: _Marble bust of Carlo Zeno, unknown artist; Museo Civico, Room XVI._] Then, from aloft, a sail was sighted. It was the sail of a galley. Another, and another, and another, all galleys unmistakably, they hove in sight above the horizon, eighteen in all. Hostile, or friendly? That was the question. Zeno, or destruction and the end? Then the banner of Saint Mark broke out from the peak of the foremost, and floated fair on the morning breeze. It was Zeno indeed. And not only had the famous leader himself come at the one moment of all others when he was most needed, perhaps in his whole life; he came as a victor, bringing prizes and spoil of inestimable value. He had laid waste the Genoese coast, almost to the city itself; he had intercepted Genoese convoys of grain off Apulia, he had harassed the enemy’s commerce in the East, and he had captured, off Rhodes, a huge vessel of theirs with five hundred thousand pieces of gold.