camp. Sometimes the Egyptian fleet drove the
Christian ships far out to sea; and Saladin could then succor the
garrison with provisions and fresh troops, till new Frankish squadrons
again surrounded the harbor, and only a few intrepid divers could
steal through between the hostile ships. On land, too, now one side
and now the other was in danger. One day the Sultan scaled the
Christian intrenchments, and advanced close to the walls of the city,
before the Franks rallied sufficiently to drive him back by a
desperate attack; but they soon took their revenge in a night sortie,
when they attacked the Sultan in his very tent, and he narrowly
escaped by rapid flight. Against the town their progress was very
slow, as the garrison, under an able and energetic commander,
Bohaeddin, showed itself resolute and indefatigable. One week passed
after another, and the condition of the Franks became painfully
complicated. They could go neither backward nor forward, they could
make no impression on the walls; nor could they re-embark in the face
of an active enemy. There was no choice but to conquer or die; so
preparations were made for a long sojourn; wooden barracks, and for
the princes even stone houses were built, and a new hostile town arose
all around Ptolemais. In spite of this the winter brought innumerable
hardships. In that small space more than a hundred thousand men were
crowded together, with insufficient shelter, and uncertain supplies of
wretched food; pestilential diseases soon broke out, which swept away
thousands, and were intensified by the exhalations from the heaps of
dead. Saladin retreated from their deadly vicinity to more airy
quarters on the adjacent hills; his troops also suffered from the
severe weather, but were far better supplied than the Christians with
water, provisions, and other comforts, as the caravans from Cairo and
Bagdad met in their camp, and numbers of merchants displayed in
glittering booths all kinds of eastern wares.

It was an unexampled assemblage of the forces of two quarters of the
world round one spot, unimportant in itself, and chosen almost by
accident. Our own times have seen a counterpart to it in the siege of
Sebastopol, which, though in a totally different form, was a new act
in the same great struggle between the East and the West. Happily the
western nations did not derive their warlike stimulus from religious
sources, and they displayed, if not their military, at any rate, their