d that Saladin thought it useless to make any general attack
upon them with the force that he had under his command.

The siege had continued two years when Philip and Richard arrived.
They came early in the spring of 1191. Of course, their arrival
greatly strengthened the camp of the besiegers, and went far to
extinguish the remaining hopes of the garrison. The commanders,
however, did not immediately give up, but held out some months longer,
hoping every day for the arrival of the promised relief from Cairo. In
the mean time, they continued to endure a succession of the most
vigorous assaults from the Crusaders, of which very marvelous tales
are told in the romantic narratives of those times. In these
narratives we have accounts of the engines which Richard set up
opposite the walls, and of the efforts made by the besieged to set
them on fire; of Richard's working, himself, like any common soldier
in putting these engines together, and in extinguishing the flames
when they were set on fire; of a vast fire-proof shed which was at
last contrived to cover and protect the engines--the covering of the
roof being made fire-proof with green hides; and of a plan which was
finally adopted, when it was found that the walls could not be beaten
down by battering-rams, of undermining them with a view of making them
tumble down by their own weight. In this case, the workmen who
undermined the walls were protected at their work by sheds built over
them, and, in order to prevent the walls from falling upon them while
they were mining, they propped them up with great beams of wood, so
placed that they could make fires under the beams when they were ready
for the walls to fall, and then have time to retreat to a safe
distance before they should be burned through. This plan, however, did
not succeed; for the walls were so prodigiously thick, and the blocks
of stone of which they were composed were so firmly bound together,
that, instead of falling into a mass of ruins, as Richard had
expected, when the props had been burned through, they only settled
down bodily on one side into the excavation, and remained nearly as
good, for all purposes of defense, as ever.

It was said that during the siege Richard and Philip obtained a great
deal of information in respect to the plans of the Saracens through
the instrumentality of some secret friend within the city, who
contrived to find means of continually sending them important
intelligence. T