was so far successful as to force its way through the opposing vessels
of the Egyptians, and to press forward towards the shore; but here its
further progress was arrested. "A wall of iron," says Ramesses, "shut
them in upon the lake," The best troops of Egypt lined the banks of
the lagoon, and wherever the invaders attempted to land they were
foiled. Repulsed, dashed to the ground, hewn down or shot down at the
edge of the water, they were slain "by hundreds of heaps of corpses."
"The infantry," says the monarch in his vainglorious inscription, set up
in memory of the event, "all the choicest troops of the army of Egypt,
stood upon the bank, furious as roaring lions; the chariot force,
selected from among the heroes that were quickest in battle, was led by
officers confident in themselves. The war-steeds quivered in all their
limbs, and burned to trample the nations under their feet. I myself was
like the god Mentu, the warlike; I placed myself at their head, and they
saw the achievements of my hands. I, Ramesses the king, behaved as a
hero who knows his worth, and who stretches out his arm over his people
in the day of combat. The invaders of my territory will gather no more
harvests upon the earth, their life is counted to them as eternity.
Those that gained the shore, I caused to fall at the water's edge, they
lay slain in heaps; I overturned their vessels; all their goods sank In
the waves." After a brief combat, all resistance ceased. The empty
ships, floating at random upon the still waters of the lagoon, or stuck
fast in the Nile mud, became the prize of the victors, and were found to
contain a rich booty. Thus ended this remarkable struggle, in which
nations widely severed and of various bloods--scarcely, as one would
have thought, known to each other, and separated by a diversity of
interests--united in an attack upon the foremost power of the known
world, traversed several hundreds of miles of land or sea successfully,
neither quarrelling among themselves nor meeting with disaster from
without, and reached the country which they had hoped to conquer, but
were there completely defeated and repulsed in two engagements--one by
land, the other partly by land and partly by sea--so that "their spirit
was annihilated, their soul was taken from them." Henceforth no one of
the nations which took part in the combined attack is found in arms
against the power that had read them so severe a lesson.

It was not long after