The sixteen towers and double enclosing walls of Maogamalki were built with the famous bricks of Babylon, sun-dried and mortared with bitumen, like all the ancient monuments of Assyria, which fear not the centuries.
The attack commenced. Again the ungainly slings groaned, and the pulleys of scorpions and onagers, or frames for flinging stones. Again huge flaming beams hissed like arrows from their engines. At the hour when even lizards go to sleep in fissures of the rock, the sun-rays fell vertically on the backs and heads of soldiers, stifling them like a crushing weight. The desperate legionaries, in defiance of their officers and of increased danger, snatched off their helmets and bloodied armour, preferring the chance of wounds to enduring that fearful heat. Above the brown towers and loopholes of Maogamalki, vomiting poisoned arrows, lances, stones, leaden bullets, and Persian fire-darts of choking sulphur, stretched the dazzling blue-grey of a dusty sky, blind and implacable as death.
The heavens beat down the hatred of men. Besiegers and besieged, utterly exhausted, ceased fighting. And a silence of noon-day, more sullen than the blackest night, fell on both hosts.
The Romans lost no whit of their courage. After the taking of Perizaborh they believed in the invincibility of the Emperor, compared him to Alexander the Great, and expected miracles from him.
For several days, on the east side of Maogamalki where the rocky steep was less abrupt, soldiers were set to hollow a tunnel. This mine, passing under the walls of the fortress, led up to the centre of the town. The width of the passage—three cubits—allowed two soldiers to proceed abreast. Huge beams at intervals supported the ceiling. The diggers worked gaily. The damp and obscurity seemed delicious to them after the excess of sunlight.
"A day or two ago we were frogs and now we're moles," said the soldiers to each other, laughing.
Three cohorts, the Mattiarians, Lactiniarians, and Victorians, fifteen hundred picked men, keeping the sternest silence, crawled into the subterranean passage, impatiently waiting orders to burst into the town. At daybreak the attack was expressly directed on two opposite sides, in order to divert the attention of the Persians, and Julian himself led up the soldiers by a single narrow path under a hail of stones and arrows.
"We shall see," he said to himself with glee at the danger; "we shall see if the gods preserve me, or if, by a miracle, I shall escape death even now."
Some irresistible curiosity, or thirst for the supernatural, urged him to expose himself, and with a defiant smile to challenge Fate to do her worst. It was not death he feared, but only defeat in his purposeless and intoxicating game against the higher powers.
The soldiers followed him on, fascinated by and catching the contagion of his mad mood.