disastrous power. Shells from the palace walls fell upon us thick and
fast. No lightning's flash can accomplish such ruin as the modern
ordnance projectile. A few centuries back the thought would have been
incomprehensible; even so the visionary and ridiculed idea of to-day may
be realised in the future. The shots descended, a veritable storm of
lead, and several times the clouds of choking dust they set up enveloped
us; but we were undaunted, and continued to work the Maxim, spreading its
death-dealing rain up the broad thoroughfare and preventing any from
reaching our barricade.

The idea of the troops was no doubt to gradually force us back from the
external positions of the city into the central, and from the centre to
the east in the direction of the gate that gave access to the country. By
this means the fighting area would be compressed, and we should be
surrounded by a large body of our enemies who had massed outside the gate
to cut off our retreat. But the thundering boom of cannon and sharp
rattle of musketry on our right, showed that our comrades, barricaded in
a great thoroughfare running parallel with the one wherein we were, had
also set to work to repel their enemy.

Barricades had sprung up in all directions like magic. The four corners
of intersecting streets were the positions mostly chosen for them, and
every conceivable article was used in their construction. Women and
children vied with the men in activity and resourcefulness in the
erection of these improvised works of defence, and the work slackened not
even when shells and bullets fell about in dangerous proximity.

Our companions, the partisans of Omar to whom they looked to deliver
their country from the thraldom of tyranny, were fortunately not devoid
of those soldier-like qualities which in past ages had raised the
military renown of Mo to the greatest altitude; what they lacked mostly
outside of themselves were capable officering and generalship. There were
a few officers of the royal army among them, men who had become convinced
that a change of government was necessary, but the people were left to do
battle mainly on the principle of individual enterprise.

Time after time attacks, each increasing in strength and proving more
disastrous to us than the first, were made upon us. But our Maxims kept
up their rattle, and from every part of the great wall of paving stones,
furniture, trees and heaped-up miscellaneous articles, there poured