Jerusalem was crowded with fugitives who had been driven into the Holy City from the provinces. The houses could not contain them, and the streets were filled with women and children, who slept night after night upon the cold pavement. At the expiration of a fortnight, Saladin finding his incessant attacks continually foiled, retired from the walls, and employed his troops in the construction of military engines, stationing ten thousand cavalry around the city to intercept fugitives, and prevent the introduction of supplies. When his engines were completed, he directed all his efforts against the northern wall of the city, which extends between St. Stephen’s gate and the gate of Jaffa. Ten thousand soldiers were attached to the military engines, and were employed day and night in battering the fortifications. Barefoot processions of women, monks, and priests were made to the holy sepulchre, to implore the Son of God to save his tomb and his inheritance from impious violation. The females, as a mark of humility and distress, cut off their hair and cast it to the winds; and the ladies of Jerusalem made their daughters do penance by standing up to their necks in tubs of cold water placed upon Mount Calvary. But it availed nought, “for our Lord Jesus Christ,” says the chronicler, “would not listen to any prayer that they made, for the filth, the luxury, and the adultery which prevailed in the city did not suffer prayer or supplication to ascend before God.” To prevent the garrison from attempting to break the force of the battering-rams, Saladin constructed vast mangonels and machines, which cast enormous stones and flaming beams of timber, covered with pitch and naptha, upon the ramparts, and over the walls into the city. He moreover employed miners to sap the foundations of the towers, and on the 16th of October the angle of the northern wall, where it touches the valley of Gehinnon, was thrown down with a tremendous crash. The appalling intelligence spread through the city, and filled every heart with mourning. Friends embraced one another as it were for the last time; mothers clung to their little ones, anticipating with heart-rending agony the fearful moment when they would be torn from them for ever; and the men gazed around in gloomy silence, appalled and stupified. Young mothers might be seen carrying their babes in their arms to Mount Calvary, and placing them before the altars of the church of the Resurrection, as if they thought that the sweet innocence of these helpless objects would appease the wrath of heaven. The panic-stricken garrison deserted the fortifications, but the infidels fortunately deferred the assault until the succeeding morning. During the night attempts were made, but in vain, to organize a strong guard to watch the breach. “With my own ears,” says abbot Coggleshale, “I heard it proclaimed, between the wall and the counterscarp, by the patriarch and the chief men of the city, that if fifty strong and