before.

They passed through the clouds of stones and arrows which the besieged
hurled at them, and the cohorts leading on a run climbed up the pile of
debris, struggling with the more audacious Saguntines, who still
disputed passage through the breach. After a short conflict the
besiegers made themselves masters of the entrance to the city, and they
burst into exclamations of triumph.

Hannibal marched intrepidly at the head of his soldiers; but on gaining
the crest of the pile in the breach he stepped backward with an
expression of disgust.

Before him stretched a broad waste of demolished houses, and beyond the
hills of debris rose a second monstrous wall, constructed in haste, as
if an enormous broom had swept the desolated structures of the interior
to the entrance of the city. Great, square-hewn stones, chunks of
masonry, broken columns, were laid with the regularity of blocks in a
wall, and the interstices were chinked with fresh clay. This wall
quickly raised by a supreme effort of the whole city was taller than the
previous one, and in the form of a curve it joined with the two curtains
of the ancient walls which were still standing.

Hannibal paled with wrath on seeing that all his efforts had served only
to make him master of a pitiful little piece of ground covered by heaps
of ruins and that by prodigious skill the walls which he had battered
down had risen again beyond in a single night. Saguntum would destroy
her houses to refortify herself with new barriers, cutting off his
passage! He would have to conquer the ground inch by inch, street by
street, and it might cost him months and years to narrow it down, first
around the Forum, then up to the hill of the Acropolis, before he could
succeed in making it surrender.

On the summit of their new wall the Saguntines showed themselves as
resolute as the day before, and their bows and slings prevented the
assault of the enemy, who ended by falling back, remaining under cover
of the debris at the breach.

Hannibal stood outside the city wall, contemplating the heights of the
Acropolis. He realized that he might gradually sacrifice his whole army
if he continued attacking Saguntum on the level and weaker side where
the besieged defended the ground so tenaciously. Calling Maherbal and
his brother Mago, he laid before them the necessity of capturing a
position on the hill, and of assaulting a portion of the immense
Acropolis to attack the city from that dire