Djezzar thought to bestow a suitable gift upon Sidney Smith; he had all these heads put in a sack and sent to the English commodore. Sidney Smith merely looked sadly at the ghastly trophy and said: "This is what it means to be allied with barbarians."
[CHAPTER VI]
PTOLEMAIS
However indifferent Bonaparte was in regard to Jerusalem, having passed within twenty miles of it without tarrying to visit it, he was none the less interested in the ground on which he stood. Being unable, or not having cared to do as Alexander did at the time of his conquest of India, to go out of his way to visit the high-priest of Jerusalem, he regarded it as some compensation to stand upon the ancient site of Ptolemais, and to set up his tent where Richard Cœur-de-Lion and Philippe-Auguste had set up theirs.
Far from being indifferent to his historical surroundings, his heart rejoiced in it; and he had chosen the little hill where he had watched the fight on the first day as his headquarters, confident that the heroes who had preceded him had placed their banners on the same spot.
But he, the first of the leaders of political crusades, following the banner of his own fortune and leaving behind him all the religious beliefs which had led millions of men to the same place, from Godfrey de Bouillon to Saint Louis—he, on the contrary, brought in his train the science of the eighteenth century, of Volney and Dupuis; or, in other words, scepticism.
While caring little for Christian traditions, he was on the other hand deeply interested in historical legends.
The very evening of the unfortunate assault in which poor Mailly had perished by the same death as his brother, he assembled his officers and generals in his tent, and ordered Bourrienne to take the few books which composed his library from the boxes. Unfortunately it contained but few historical works relating to Syria. He had only Plutarch, the lives of Cicero, Pompey, Alexander and Antony; and in the way of political literature he had only the Old and New Testaments and a Mythology.