Meantime the check given to the first division of the cavalry at the barricade had resulted in a congestion all down the advancing lines. The second division had closed up with the first, the third with the second, and on the heels of the cavalry came the infantry. Dramali, who was stationed in the rear still, almost on the plain of Argos, had ordered them to advance, at all costs, till they gained the top of the pass, whence they could intrench themselves on the open ground, and every moment added a crust to the congealment of destruction. The masses of those moving on from behind pushed the first rank forward and forward, all squeezed together, and pressing against the wall of barricade, as a river in flood presses against the arches of a bridge. At two or three points it had been entirely broken down, and through these--now free for a moment, now choked again with the bodies of horses and their riders--a few escaped through the first ranks of Mainats and into the road beyond, raked indeed by the other ranks, who held the pass higher up, but no longer exposed to the full threefold short range fire from Niketas, the barrier, and those in ambush on the left. Already the wall of dead and dying was heaped higher than the barricade that the Mainats had raised, and the horses of the Turks who forced their way through trampled on the bodies of the fallen. But pass they must, for they were forced forward, as by some hideous, slow-moving glacier, by a stream of dead and living. Here and there a dead horse carrying a dead rider was borne on upright and unable to fall because of those who pressed so closely on each side, the rider bowed forward over the neck of his horse or sprawling sideways across the knee of his fellow, the horse's head supported on the quarters of the beast in front or wedged between it and the next. More terrible even was some other brute, wounded and screaming, but unable to move except as it was moved and carried along for some seconds perhaps, till two or three of those in front forced their way through the breaches in the barricade of horses and riders and gave it space, so that it fell and was mercifully trampled out of pain and life.