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Updated: May 19, 2025
Men build dikes; but the besieging tides bring up their battering-rams whole forests of drift huge trunks of water-oak and weighty cypress. Forever the yellow Mississippi strives to build; forever the sea struggles to destroy; and amid their eternal strife the islands and the promontories change shape, more slowly, but not less fantastically, than the clouds of heaven.
The Indian lay on his back suffocating in mire and water; while astride his body sat the late prisoner, covered from head to foot with mud and gore, furiously plying his fists, for he had no other weapons, about the head and face of his foe, his blows falling like sledge-hammers or battering-rams, with such strength and fury that it seemed impossible any one of them could fail to crush the skull to atoms; and all the while garnishing them with a running accompaniment of oaths and maledictions little less emphatic and overwhelming.
So many came to see, but when they with their own eyes did behold the captains in the palace, and their battering-rams ever playing at the castle gates to beat them down, they were riveted in their fears, and it made them all in amaze.
The priests, who no doubt had been delayed by the procuring of the timbers which were to serve as battering-rams, and the labour necessary to drag them up the steep incline of the tunnel, had returned, and in force. A few more minutes and a succession of dull thuds on the further side of the ice wall told the little band of defenders that their enemies were at work.
All the sad elements of war appear, and make us shudder masses of armed men with their slings and battering-rams clarions and shouts wounded and slain, all appear as in a panorama. The mind becomes entranced, and when sober reflection regains her command, we naturally inquire, Can all this have taken place in my heart?
Wherever the battering-rams had beat down any part of the wall, and the bridges were thrown out, instantly the argyraspides mounted the breach with the utmost valor, being led on by Admetus, one of the bravest officers in the army, who was killed by the thrust of a spear as he was encouraging his soldiers. The presence of the King, and the example he set, fired his troops with unusual bravery.
At last it was evident that the barricade was no longer tenable, for the heavy pieces of furniture they had heaped up to oppose entrance, were completely hammered to fragments by poles brought up by the assailants, and used as battering-rams.
The Mongul princes began the siege of Otrar by filling up the ditches that encircled the outer wall of the town in the places where they wished to plant their battering-rams to make breaches in the walls.
It afforded the enemies of Colonel Burr an opportunity to lay a foundation deep and broad, from which to assail him with the battering-rams of detraction, falsehood, and calumny. From that day until the period when he was driven into exile from the land of his fathers, he was pursued with an intolerance relentless as the grave.
For two or three generations after Bracciaforte, the terrible founder of the line, had made himself master of the republic, his descendants had clung to the old brick fortress or rocca which the great condottiere had held successfully against the burghers' arquebuses and the battering-rams of rival adventurers, and which still glassed its battlements in the slow waters of the Piana beside the city wall.
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