The struggle raged fiercely day by day, and the victims were reckoned by hundreds among the enemy every twenty-four hours. The carnage among the besiegers was awful. Their close ranks were mowed down by the Knights, as grass falls before the scythe of the husbandman. When the Ottoman soldiers came in a body, bearing scaling-ladders wherewith to reach the top of the rampart of St. Elmo, and while they were in the most exposed situation, sharp-cornered stones, as heavy as two men could lift, were launched suddenly upon those ascending the ladders, forcing them to the ground, and killing them in large numbers. Boiling pitch was poured upon the upturned faces of the assailants, blinding and agonizing them. Iron hoops bound with cotton thoroughly saturated with gum and gunpowder were set on fire, and so thrown as to encircle the heads of three or four of the enemy, binding them together in a fiery circle which they could not extinguish, and which burned them fatally before they reached the ground below. Many other horribly destructive and fatal devices were adopted by the defenders, which spread death in all directions among the Turks. When one of the enemy succeeded in reaching the top of the ramparts, he was instantly met by a Knight, whose keen battle-axe severed his head from the body, both head and body tumbling back into the ditch among the assailants. Still, the indomitable Ottomans renewed their attacks from day to day, hoping to carry the fort at last by exhausting the physical endurance of the defenders, though it should cost ten Mussulmans' lives for one Christian. Each time they marched to the assault, the death-dealing rocks, the boiling pitch, and the fiery hoops did their terrible work, in connection with the ordinary weapons of war, in the use of which the Knights were so expert. It is said that in the hands of a powerful man familiar with it, no weapon is so destructive at close quarters as the broad-bladed, keen-edged battle-axe of those days. The Orientals depended almost solely upon their crude firearms,--the blunderbuss,--together with their light swords and spears.