Page:William Muir, Thomas Hunter Weir - The Caliphate; Its Rise, Decline, and Fall (1915).djvu/137

 108 strewn with them. The wounded were made over to the women to nurse, if perchance they might survive, or rather—in the language of Islām—"until the Lord should decide whether to grant, or to withhold, the crown of Martyrdom." The dead were borne to ʿOdheib, a valley in the rear, where the women and children hastily dug graves for them in the sandy soil. The wounded, too, were carried thither. For the suffering sick it was a weary way under the burning sun. A solitary palm-tree stood on the road, and under its welcome shade they were for a moment laid. Its memory is consecrated in such plaintive verse as this:—

A day and night of unceasing conflict was still before the combatants. The spirit of the Persians, whose dead lay unburied on the field, flagged at the disasters of the preceding day, but much was looked for from the elephants, which, now refitted, appeared upon the field, each protected by a company of horse and foot. The battle was about to open, when suddenly Hāshim came in sight with the main body of his Syrian contingent. Sweeping across the plain, he charged right into the enemy, pierced their ranks, and reaching the river bank, turned and rode triumphantly back, amid shouts of welcome. The fighting was again severe, and the day balanced by alternate victory and repulse. Yezdejird, alive to the crisis, sent his bodyguard into the field. The elephants were the terror of the Arabs, and again threatened to paralyse their efforts. In this emergency, Saʿd had recourse to Al-Ḳaʿḳāʿ, who was achieving marvels, and had already slain thirty Persians in single combat; so that the annalists gratefully acknowledge that "had it not been for what the Lord put it into the heart of Al-Ḳaʿḳāʿ to do, we surely had been that day worsted." Saʿd now learned that the eye and trunk were the only vulnerable parts of the elephant: "Aim at these," he said, "and we shall be rid of this calamity." So Al-Ḳaʿḳāʿ with his brother Āṣim and a band of followers issued on the perilous