her eyes then, lying back amongst the cushions where
I had placed her, and dropped off into healthy sleep, with the smiles
still playing upon her lips. I put the coverlet over her, and kissed her
lightly, holding back my beard lest it should sweep her cheek. And then
I went out of the chamber.

That beard had grown vastly disagreeable to me these last hours, and
then I went into a room in the house, and found instruments, and shaved
it down to the bare chin. A change of robe also I found there and took
it instead of my squalid rags. If a man is in truth a king, he owes
these things to the dignity of his office.

But, if the din of the fighting was any guide, mine was a narrowing
kingdom. Every hour it seemed to grow fiercer and more near, and it was
clear that some of the gates in the passage up the cleft in the
cliff, impregnable though all men had thought them, had yielded to the
vehemence of Phorenice's attack. And, indeed, it was scarcely to be
marvelled at. With all her genius spurred on to fury by the blow that
had been struck at her by wrecking so fair a part of the city, the
Empress would be no light adversary even for a strong place to resist,
and the Sacred Mountain was no longer strong.

Defences of stone, cunningly planned and mightily built, it still
possessed, but these will not fight alone. They need men to line them,
and, moreover, abundance of men. For always in a storm of this kind,
some desperate fellows will spit at death and get to hand grips, or
slingers and archers slip in their shot, or the throwing-fire gets home,
or (as here) some newfangled machine like Phorenice's fire-tubes, make
one in a thousand of their wavering darts find the life; and so, though
the general attacking loses his hundreds, the defenders also are not
without their dead.

The slaughter, as it turned out, had been prodigious. As fast as the
stormers came up, the Priests who held the lowest gate remaining to us
rained down great rocks upon them till the narrow alley of the stair
was paved with their writhing dead. But Phorenice stood on a spur of the
rock below them urging on the charges, and with an insane valour company
after company marched up to hurl themselves hopelessly against the
defences. They had no machines to batter the massive gates, and their
attack was as pathetically useless as that of a child who hammers
against a wall with an orange; and meanwhile the terrible stones from
above mowed them down remorseles