The walls of Bethhoron, manned only with the wreck of the troops that we had routed from all their positions, could offer no impediment to hands and hearts like ours. I ordered an immediate assault. The resistance was desperate, for beyond this city there was no place of refuge nearer than Antipatris. We were twice repulsed, and I headed the third attack myself. The dead filled up the ditch, and I had already arrived at the foot of the rampart, with the scaling-ladder in my hand, when I heard Jubal’s voice behind me. He was leaping and dancing in the attitudes of utter madness. But there was no time to be lost. I sprang upon the battlements, tore a standard from its bearer, and waved it over my head with a shout of victory. The plain, the hills, the valleys, covered with the host rushing to the assault, echoed the cry; I was at the summit of fortune! In the next moment I felt a sudden shock. Darkness covered my eyes, and I plunged headlong. I awoke in a dungeon. CHAPTER XXXV _The Lapse of Years_ [Sidenote: In a Dungeon] In that dungeon I lay for two years![37] How I lived, or how I bore existence, I can now have no conception. I was not mad, nor altogether insensible to things about me, nor even without occasional inclination for the common objects of our being. I used to look for the glimmer of daylight that was suffered to enter my cell. The reflection of the moon in a pool, of which, by climbing to the loophole, I could gain a glimpse, was waited for with some feeble feeling of pleasure, but my animal appetites were more fully alive than ever. An hour’s delay of the miserable provision that was thrown through my bars made me wretched. I devoured it like a wild beast, and then longed through the dreary hours for its coming again! I made no attempt to escape. I dragged myself once to the entrance of the dungeon, found it secured by an iron door, and never tried it again. If every bar had been broken, I scarcely know whether I should have attempted to pass it. Even in my more reasoning hours, I felt no desire to move. Destiny was upon me. My doom was marked in characters which nothing but blindness could fail to read; and to struggle with fate, what was it but to prepare for new misfortune? [Sidenote: The Prince of Naphtali is Free]