ly if the place is at
last taken by storm, are awful beyond description, they wished to save
their wives, and daughters, and helpless babes from having to witness
them.

In the mean time, as the siege advanced, the parties became more and
more incensed against each other. They treated the captives which they
took on either side with greater and greater cruelty, each thinking
that they were only retaliating worse injuries from the other. The
Macedonians approached nearer and nearer. The resources of the unhappy
city were gradually cut off and its strength worn away. The engines
approached nearer and nearer to the walls, until the battering rams
bore directly upon them, and breaches began to be made. At length one
great breach on the southern side was found to be "practicable," as
they call it. Alexander began to prepare for the final assault, and
the Tyrians saw before them the horrible prospect of being taken by
storm.

Still they would not submit. Submission would now have done but little
good, though it might have saved some of the final horrors of the
scene. Alexander had become greatly exasperated by the long resistance
which the Tyrians had made. They probably could not now have averted
destruction, but they might, perhaps, have prevented its coming upon
them in so terrible a shape as the irruption of thirty thousand
frantic and infuriated soldiers through the breaches in their walls
to take their city by storm.

The breach by which Alexander proposed to force his entrance was on
the southern side. He prepared a number of ships, with platforms
raised upon them in such a manner that, on getting near the walls,
they could be let down, and form a sort of bridge, over which the men
could pass to the broken fragments of the wall, and thence ascend
through the breach above.

The plan succeeded. The ships advanced to the proposed place of
landing. The bridges were let down. The men crowded over them to the
foot of the wall. They clambered up through the breach to the
battlements above, although the Tyrians thronged the passage and made
the most desperate resistance. Hundreds were killed by darts, and
arrows, and falling stones, and their bodies tumbled into the sea. The
others, paying no attention to their falling comrades, and drowning
the horrid screams of the crushed and the dying with their own frantic
shouts of rage and fury, pressed on up the broken wall till they
reached the battlements above. The vast throng