The locust-swarms were better drilled than we, the owls were not so blind. At every stage we left behind poor simpletons that moaned and shrilled, Thinking each swamp Gethsemane. It seemed that at their agony The doctors scoffed with cross aloft, reciting magic formulæ. Alone the princes lightly pranced, as if the pilgrimage enhanced Their right to weigh upon the world thereafter. So the doom advanced To dervish cries and jester's japes. Hermit and boor and jackanapes, I and my ghost-pale master threw a trail of shadows, motley shapes, Where Rhodopé's wine-purples mix snow with the moonlight. Oh, 'twas gall Amid the horror of it all that Bulgars thought us lunatics, Or worse; for ever at our flank a stream, that in my nostrils stank, Seethed; and amid the best of her the scum of Europe wenched and drank. At last we halted where Constantinople's grandeur puts to scorn The villaged west, and challenges the Orient on her Golden Horn. Ah, brazen, were your heart as strong as looked your square-chinned ramparts.... Long We waited at the gates in dust knee-deep. The Emperor did not trust The help that he had craved. He swore he had not asked so many ... more Would ruin him.... He let the heat suck out our strength at every pore. But we were told great noblemen, Godfrey of Bouillon in Ardennes, Robert of Flanders, "Sword and Lance of Christians," all the flower of France Were on our side, Hugh Vermandois, Stephen of Chartres and Troyes and Blois, Baldwin and Raymond of Toulouse. The preacher said we could not lose. Moreover he had spoken with angel-reserves behind us, sith They sent assurance (Saracens we mocked, but had our own _Hadith_) That we should root the heathen out, and blight as with a ten years' drought Their fields. Jehovah willed that we should leave no seed of theirs to sprout. Our mates streamed in from lands beyond the Adriatic, Bohemond With Tancred; strait Dalmatian bays, Epirus, Scodra, devious ways Bore them with boastful tales of sport and plunder, and a vague report That this was nothing to the spoil that beckoned from the Moslem court.