The Pilgrim's Shell; Or, Fergan the Quarryman: A Tale from the Feudal Times

by Eugène Sue

"We are ready, holy man, and have been long waiting," answered several bandits; "we are losing our time here; they are pillaging elsewhere, holy father in God! We want our share of the booty."

"Here comes your share of this great feast, my brothers in Christ. The vapor of the infidels' blood rises towards the Lord like an incense of myrrh and balsam! Let not one of the miscreants, that we are about to throw down to you from this terrace, escape with his life!"

Peter the Hermit vanished and almost immediately the bust of a Saracen, clad in the purple caftan embroidered in gold, appeared above. Although bound hands and feet, the wild jumps of the unhappy man showed that he resisted with all his might the efforts of those who strove to throw him down into the street. A few minutes later, however, half his body had been forced over the balustrade. He straightened up once more, but immediately was hurled into space and dropped, head foremost, thirty feet below. A joyous clamor broke out at the man's fall, and redoubled when, with a dull thud, his skull struck the pavement and broke. He lived a few seconds longer, and strove to turn on his side while emitting violent imprecations. But soon, riddled with sword thrusts, broken with clubs and mauled with stones, there remained of him but a mangled lump in the midst of a pool of blood. "Father in God," cried out the mob, "the job is done! Hurry up! Send us another!"

The hideous figure of Peter the Hermit re-appeared above the balustrade. He leaned his head forward and contemplated the remains of the Saracen. "Well done, my children!" The monk had hardly disappeared again, when two youths of fifteen to sixteen years, brothers no doubt, and bound face to face, were thrown down from the terrace. The violence of the fall snapped the bands that held them together. The elder was killed on the spot, the younger's legs were broken. For a few moments he dragged himself on his hands, moaning piteously and seeking to approach his brother's corpse. The Crusaders pounced upon these new victims. Women, monsters in human form, pulled out their entrails, indulged in obscene and infamous mutilations upon the two corpses, and throwing into the air the bleeding parts, cried out exultingly: "Let's exterminate the infidels! God wills it!"

Twenty times did Peter the Hermit re-appear on the terrace, and twenty times were bodies thrown down over the balustrade, and torn to pieces by the crowd, drunk with bloodshed. Among these victims were five young girls and two other boys from ten to twelve years of age.

All the inhabitants of Jerusalem who were captured, even those who had paid ransom for their lives—men, women and children—all, to the number of seventy thousand human beings, were thus massacred. The extermination lasted two days and three nights, obedient to the following order of the seigneur Tancred, one of the heroes of the Crusade: "We consider it necessary to put to the sword without delay both the prisoners and those who paid ransom."

The last of the victims, cast at the mob by Peter the Hermit, were being massacred, when another band of Crusaders, running up from the other end of the street and marching towards the large square, passed by shouting: "The people of Tancred are pillaging the Mosque of Omar. * * * By all the saints of Paradise and all the devils of hell, we want our part of the booty!"

"And we stay here amusing ourselves with corpses!" cried out the butchers under Peter the Hermit's terrace. "Let's on to the mosque! To the sack! To the sack!"

Again Fergan was carried by the torrent of the crowd and arrived upon a spacious square littered with Saracen corpses, seeing that, after the assault had succeeded, the Saracens had retreated, fighting from street to street, and drawn themselves up before the mosque, where a last battle was delivered. At that place, these heroes were all killed defending the temple, the refuge of the women, the children and the old men, too feeble to fight, and who relied upon the pity and mercy of the vanquishers. Easier far had it been to excite the pity of a hungry tiger than that of the Crusaders.

Several tiers of marble stairs led down to the Mosque of Omar, whose floor was about three feet below the level of the street. Such had been the butchery indulged in by the Crusaders, and so much blood had run down into the temple, which measured more than one thousand feet in circumference, that the blood, rising above the first stairs, began to run over into the square. The interior of the Mosque of Omar offered to the eye but one vast sheet of blood, still warm, and the vapor of which rose like a light mist above an innumerable mass of corpses, here wholly, yonder only partially submerged in the red lake, where heads and members hacked from the trunk with hatchets, were seen floating at large. Of the Crusaders who entered the Mosque of Omar for pillage, some waded in blood to their waists. The warmth of the flowing blood and the site of the shocking butchery made Fergan reel with dizziness. His heart thumped against his ribs and his strength gave way. In vain he sought support against one of the porphyry columns at the facade of the mosque. He dropped down unconscious, his legs steeped in blood.