The little temple in which I was gaoled had been robbed and
despoiled of all its furnishments. But the light-slits, where at
certain hours of the day the rays of our Lord the Sun had fallen
upon the image of the God, before this had been taken away, gave me
vantage places from which I could see over the camp of these rebel
besiegers, and a dreary prospect it was. The people seemed to have
shucked off the culture of centuries in as many months, and to have
gone back for the most part to sheer brutishness. The majority
harboured on the bare ground. Few owned shelter, and these were
merely bowers of mud and branches.

They fought and quarrelled amongst themselves for food, eating
their meat raw, and their grain (when they had it) unground. Many
who passed my vision I saw were even gnawing the soft inside of
tree bark.

The dead lay where they fell. The sick and the wounded found
no hand to tend them. Great man-eating birds hovered about the
camp or skulked about, heavy with gorging, amongst the hovels, and
no one had public spirit enough to give them battle. The stink of
the place rose up to heaven as a foul incense inviting a
pestilence. There was no order, no trace of strong command
anywhere. With three hundred well-disciplined troops it seemed to
me that I could have sent those poor desperate hordes flying in
panic to the forest.

However, there was no very lengthy space of time granted me
for thinking out the policy of this matter to any great depth. The
attack on the gate had been delivered with suddenness; the repulse