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"My foot darted out like a ballista, and came against the partition, which it broke in; I really thought that, like Samson, I had demolished the temple. And the number of pictures, the quantity of china, vases of flowers, carpets, and window-panes that fell down were really wonderful." "Indeed!" "Without reckoning that on the other side of the partition was a small table laden with porcelain "
He did not proceed, you may feel assured, to fix his choice upon some crabbed philosopher of frowning mien, with a flood of gray-and-white beard rolling down over a mantle in proud tatters; nor a warrior who could talk of nothing save ballista, catapults, and scythed chariots; nor a sententious Eupatrid full of councils and politic maxims; but Gyges, whose reputation for gallantry caused him to be regarded as a connoisseur in regard to women.
Besides many improvements in arms and manual exercise, the Normans perfected the old Roman machines and engines used in sieges. The scorpion was a huge cross-bow, the catapults showered stones to a great distance; the ballista discharged flights of darts and arrows.
He would tell my uncle Toby of the Catapultae of the Syrians, which threw such monstrous stones so many hundred feet, and shook the strongest bulwarks from their very foundation: he would go on and describe the wonderful mechanism of the Ballista which Marcellinus makes so much rout about! the terrible effects of the Pyraboli, which cast fire; the danger of the Terebra and Scorpio, which cast javelins.
The mangonels and petraries, and other implements for battering walls, and the ballista, with every efficient means of throwing missive weapons, were ready to discharge their artillery upon the heads of the beseiged. A messenger, meanwhile, was sent into the citadel to apprise De Valence and the Governor Cressingham of the assault.
Three thousand Turkish heads were hurled by catapults into the city by way of information. The records paint an awful picture of the siege. Whatever of mechanism or method was known to Greeks or Romans was employed by besiegers and besieged. Stones, fireballs, bunches of arrows, heavy beams were fired into the city by ballista and catapult, and were fired back with equal skill and abundance.
But indeed he had not such a high opinion of gunpowder but that he believed engines for projection, more powerful as well as less expensive, could be constructed, after the fashion of ballista or catapult, by the use of a mode he had discovered of immeasurably increasing the strength of springs, so that stones of a hundredweight might be thrown into a city from a quarter of a mile's distance without any noise audible to those within.
There will be little danger in it, for his head will not show over the battlements, and it is well that he should learn to hear without fear the whizz of an arrow or the shock of a great stone from a ballista, the clash of arms, and the shouting of men.
Then when the beam of the catapult rose, when the pillar of the ballista trembled with the shock of the spring, when the stones were shooting in rays, and the darts pouring in streams, he would incline his whole body and fling his arms into the air as though to follow them. The soldiers admired his skill and executed his commands.
He constructed at enormous expense, with the utmost care and exertion, an helepolis one hundred and thirty-five feet high and sixty feet broad. He strengthened it with hair and rawhide so that it could withstand the blow of a stone weighing three hundred and sixty pounds shot from a ballista; the machine itself weighed three hundred and sixty thousand pounds.
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