enemies. Yet it is not so, for I desire peace and to save life,
not to destroy it. It is you Christians who for hard upon a
hundred years have drenched these sands with blood, because you
say that you wish to possess the land where your prophet lived
and died more than eleven centuries ago. How many Saracens have
you slain? Hundreds of thousands of them. Moreover, with you
peace is no peace. Those Orders that I destroyed tonight have
broken it a score of times. Well, I will bear no more. Allah has
given me and my army the victory, and I will take your cities and
drive the Franks back into the sea. Let them seek their own lands
and worship God there after their own fashion, and leave the East
in quiet.

"Now, Sir Godwin, tell these captives for me that tomorrow I send
those of them who are unwounded to Damascus, there to await
ransom while I besiege Jerusalem and the other Christian cities.
Let them have no fear; I have emptied the cup of my anger; no
more of them shall die, and a priest of their faith, the bishop
of Nazareth, shall stay with their sick in my army to minister to
them after their own rites."

So Godwin rose and told them, and they answered not a word, who
had lost all hope and courage.

Afterwards he asked whether he and his brother were also to be
sent to Damascus.

Saladin replied, "No; he would keep them for awhile to
interpret, then they might go their ways without ransom."

On the morrow, accordingly, the captives were sent to Damascus,
and that day Saladin took the castle of Tiberias, setting at
liberty Eschiva, the wife of Raymond, and her children. Then he
moved on to Acre, which he took, relieving four thousand Moslem
captives, and so on to other towns, all of which fell before him,
till at length he came to Ascalon, which he besieged in form,
setting up his mangonels against its walls.

The night was dark outside of Ascalon, save when the flashes of
lightning in the storm that rolled down from the mountains to the
sea lit it up, showing the thousands of white tents set round the
city, the walls and the sentries who watched upon them, the
feathery palms that stood against the sky, the mighty,
snow-crowned range of Lebanon, and encircling all the black
breast of the troubled ocean. In a little open space of the
garden of an empty house that stood without the walls, a man and
a woman were talking, both of them wrapped in dark cloaks. They
were Godwin and Masouda.

"Well," said Godwin ea