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By eight o'clock at night Oudinôt and Dombrowski had taken possession of the heights commanding the passage, while General Eblé descended from them. That general placed himself on the borders of the river, with his pontonniers and a waggon-load of the irons of abandoned wheels, which at all hazards he had made into cramp-irons.
These walls covered with hieroglyphics and paintings of allegorical processions, might well have occupied thousands of arms for thousands of years in their formation. These corridors of interminable length opened into square chambers, in the midst of which pits had been contrived, through which we descended by cramp-irons or spiral stairways.
They were armed with wooden javelins, which they threw with great strength and dexterity. The points of these javelins were like cramp-irons, tied to the shafts with the guts of sea-dogs, and would run so deep into the flesh, that it was almost impossible to get them out.
What was in it was very little known, and the merry fellow did not enlighten anybody. From time to time he climbed up the cramp-irons riveted in the walls to this store-room, the inspection of which he had reserved to himself.
It was only on the 25th, at five in the evening, that Eblé arrived there, followed only by two field forges, two waggons of coal, six covered waggons of utensils and nails, and some companies of pontonniers. At Smolensk he had made each workman provide himself with a tool and some cramp-irons.
What they were no one knew, and the good-tempered fellow did not explain. Now and then he climbed up by cramp-irons riveted to the walls, but kept the inspection to himself. He arranged and rearranged, he plunged his hand rapidly into certain mysterious boxes, singing in one of the falsest of voices an old French refrain to enliven the situation.
Even now they were quite sufficiently formidable to destroy the keel of a ship, and the BRITANNIA might likely enough have been dashed to pieces on them. The passengers landed without the least difficulty on an absolutely desert shore. Cliffs composed of beds of strata made a coast line sixty to eighty feet high, which it would have been difficult to scale without ladders or cramp-irons.
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