earthly city can be.
But the struggle which led to the scaling of Jerusalem in the
First Crusade was something much wilder and more incalculable than
anything that can be conceived in modern war. We can hardly wonder
that the crusading crowd saw the town in front of them as a sort
of tower full of demons, and the hills around them as an enchanted
and accursed land. For in one very real sense it really was so;
for all the elements and expedients were alike unknown qualities.
All their enemies' methods were secrets sprung upon them.
All their own methods were new things made out of nothing.
They wondered alike what would be done on the other side and what
could be done on their own side; every movement against them
was a stab out of the darkness and every movement they made
was a leap in the dark. First, on the one side, we have Tancred
trying to take the whole fortified city by climbing up a single
slender ladder, as if a man tried to lasso the peak of a mountain.
Then we have the flinging from the turrets of a strange
and frightful fiery rain, as if water itself had caught fire.
It was afterwards known as the Greek Fire and was probably petroleum;
but to those who had never seen (or felt) it before it may well have
seemed the flaming oil of witchcraft. Then Godfrey and the wiser
of the warriors set about to build wooden siege-towers and found
they had next to no wood to build them. There was scarcely anything
in that rocky waste but the dwarf trees of olive; a poetic fantasy
woven about that war in after ages described them as hindered
even in their wood-cutting by the demons of that weird place.
And indeed the fancy had an essential truth, for the very nature
of the land fought against them; and each of those dwarf trees,
hard and hollow and twisted, may well have seemed like a grinning goblin.
It is said that they found timbers by accident in a cavern;
they tore down the beams from ruined houses; at last they got into touch
with some craftsmen from Genoa who went to work more successfully;
skinning the cattle, who had died in heaps, and covering the timbers.
They built three high towers on rollers, and men and beasts dragged
them heavily against the high towers of the city. The catapults
of the city answered them, the cataracts of devouring fire came down;
the wooden towers swayed and tottered, and two of them suddenly stuck
motionless and useless. And as the darkness fell a great flare
must have told them tha