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 of gold (£4,000,000) being the lowest price he would accept to raise the siege. All hope of an accommodation being now lost, the engineers of the city began to devise means to counteract the hostile operations. First they tried to raise a mound, conjoined to the walls, to oppose that of the enemy, but the task proved to be beyond their powers, and so they desisted. Then they bored a tunnel, which reached as far as the centre of the mound, designing to destroy it by fire from below, but the Persian sentinels heard the excavators at work, and the scheme was frustrated by a counterboring. Another tunnel, which only attained the proximate part of the mound, was achieved with better success, and a cavern was hollowed out, into which a vast quantity of dry wood impregnated with oil, sulphur, and bitumen was introduced. Here a fire was kept burning constantly by fresh supplies, whilst the enemy's attention was diverted from the rising smoke by an incessant discharge of blazing arrows and pitch-pots. After some days, however, as the fire pervaded the viscera of the mound, volumes of smoke betrayed the real nature of the conflagration. The Persians then essayed to extinguish it with earth and water, but, failing to check it, they decided to abandon this siege work. A surprise attack by night with ladders was the next manœuvre, but the Romans were too vigilant, and the coup only led to a slaughterous repulse. During the whole period of the beleaguerment, sallies were regularly organized by the garrison, and generally with considerable loss to the besiegers. Finally Chosroes nerved himself to make a supreme effort with all his powers to storm the city. With this object in view, myriads of adobes were moulded and laid over the top of the smouldering mound. The assault was begun in the early morning, and at first bid fair to be successful, the