re such as to inspire both sides with
deperate resolution. It was the first fierce shock on land of eastern
chivalry and western enterprise since the days of St. Louis; and the
ardour of the republicans was scarcely less than that which had
kindled the soldiers of the cross. Beside the two armies rolled the
mysterious Nile; beyond glittered the slender minarets of Cairo; and
on the south there loomed the massy Pyramids. To the forty centuries
that had rolled over them, Bonaparte now appealed, in one of those
imaginative touches which ever brace the French nature to the utmost
tension of daring and endurance. Thus they advanced in close formation
towards the intrenched camp of the Mamelukes. The divisions on the
left at once rushed at its earthworks, silenced its feeble artillery,
and slaughtered the fellahin inside.

But the other divisions, now ranged in squares, while gazing at this
exploit, were assailed by the Mamelukes. From out the haze of the
mirage, or from behind the ridges of sand and the scrub of the
water-melon plants that dotted the plain, some 10,000 of these superb
horsemen suddenly appeared and rushed at the squares commanded by
Desaix and Reynier. Their richly caparisoned chargers, their waving
plumes, their wild battle-cries, and their marvellous skill with
carbine and sword, lent picturesqueness and terror to the charge.
Musketry and grapeshot mowed down their front coursers in ghastly
swathes; but the living mass swept on, wellnigh overwhelming the
fronts of the squares, and then, swerving aside, poured through the
deadly funnel between. Decimated here also by the steady fire of the
French files, and by the discharges of the rear face, they fell away
exhausted, leaving heaps of dead and dying on the fronts of the
squares, and in their very midst a score of their choicest cavaliers,
whose bravery and horsemanship had carried them to certain death
amidst the bayonets. The French now assumed the offensive, and
Desaix's division, threatening to cut off the retreat of Murad's
horsemen, led that wary chief to draw off his shattered squadrons;
others sought, though with terrible losses, to escape across the Nile
to Ibrahim's following. That chief had taken no share in the fight,
and now made off towards Syria. Such was the battle of the Pyramids,
which gained a colony at the cost of some thirty killed and about ten
times as many wounded: of the killed about twenty fell victims to the
cross fire of the tw