"An hour before sunset," September 11, as Sobieski and the generals stood at length upon the crest of the hill, "they saw outspread before them one of the most magnificent yet terrible displays of human power which man has seen. There lay the valley and the islands of the Danube, covered with an encampment, the sumptuousness of which seemed better suited for an excursion of pleasure than for the hardships of war. Within it stood an innumerable multitude of animals--horses, camels, and oxen. Two hundred thousand fighting men moved in order here and there, while along the foot of the hills below swarms of Tartars roamed at will. A frightful cannonade was raging vigorously from the one side, in feeble reply from the other. Beneath the canopy of smoke lay a great city, visible only by her spires and her pinnacles, which pierced the overwhelming cloud and flame."[16] Sobieski estimated the force before him at one hundred thousand tents and three hundred thousand men. Including the non-combatants, he was, perhaps, not far wrong; but the fighting men in the Turkish army by this time would be by many fewer than that number. One hundred and sixty-eight thousand men is the most which may be allowed from the muster-rolls found in the Vizier's tent, and that certainly exceeds the truth.[17] All around, except where in the encampment the magnificence of the invader was proudly flaunted in the face of the ruin that he had made, the prospect was desolated by war. Whatever might be the fortune of the coming day, a generation at least must elapse before those suburbs are rebuilt, those villages restored and repeopled, those fields fully cultivated again. The army felt that it lay with them, under God, to provide against that further extension of the ravage which would follow, should the bulwark of the _Oesterreich_, the Eastern March of the Empire, be forced by Hun and Tartar. Not distinguishable from the distance at which they stood, thousands of Christian captives lay in the encampment below. The morrow might deliver up the people of Vienna to a like fate with theirs. The city, as the king declared on entering it after the relief, could not have held out five days. As the wind now lifted the cloud of smoke, where should have been the fortifications, the eye could discern nothing but a circle of shapeless ruin, reaching from the Scottish gate to what had been the Burg bastion. Up to and on to it climbed the curving lines of the Turkish approaches. Sobieski had only hoped gradually to fight his way into a position whence he could communicate with the besieged, and he had arranged his plan of battle at Tuln with that idea. But the inequalities of the country between the Kahlenberg and Vienna, broken with vines, villages, small hills and hollow ways, together with the unexpectedly rapid development of the attack when once it began, seem to have interfered with his original disposition.