In the wild confusion of their onslaught, many of the infants were trampled to death. Others were killed by the priests, who seemed crazed by the fall of their idol. At first they stood stupefied.

Hiram's voice was no longer heard. They called upon him in vain.

Finally one of them ran to the fragments of the prostrate image.

Bending above it, he saw the distorted face of the chief priest gazing up into his own. The unfortunate man had been caught beneath the breast of the God to whom he had offered so many innocents, and his crushed body was being slowly roasted under the red-hot metal.

"Moloch has taken him!" the priest shouted, tossing his arms in the air.

He ran into the crowd, and, seizing one of the infants by the heels, dashed out its brains against a pillar. His example was followed by others no less frantic than himself.

"Strike, brothers!" he cried. "Baal has fallen! The end is at--"

Before he could finish the sentence, Leonidas' sword pierced his throat, and he fell upon the body of the child that he had slain.

Down the dim arcade, behind the pillars, strode the Spartan and Chares, hacking and thrusting at the black-robed minions of Moloch. They showed no mercy. Neither prayer nor entreaty availed. They sought the priests through the terrified crowd, and dragged them from every place of concealment, until of all who had been in the temple not one remained alive.

With the crash of the stone as it smote the idol, Clearchus realized what had happened. He saw the iron arms drop, and he leaped forward in time to snatch Artemisia from their embrace. The hot iron grazed his body as the image fell. Artemisia's pale, sweet face lay upon his shoulder, and he clasped her close to his breast. In the revulsion from his despair he felt his muscles endowed with strength.

He smiled to see his friends dash past him, and he looked smilingly upon the clamorous crowd in which every man fought for his life. One of the priests, whose face had been gashed to the bone, rushed upon him, with hands extended, and tried to tear Artemisia from his arms.

The man was unarmed, and Clearchus thrust him through the breast. He sank and died without a moan.

Amid the fragments of Moloch's image, the fire that had been kindled in the iron bosom flickered with blue and crimson tongues of flame.

Suddenly the crowd was split by a rush from the great doorway, and Clearchus saw Nathan leading the Israelites into the temple. With the name of Jehovah upon their lips, the swarthy, black-eyed Hebrews poured in, smiting the Tyrians and beating them down with merciless strokes in the delirium of their exaltation. They swept through the temple like wolves through a sheepfold. The floor was heaped with the dead, and the stones were slippery with blood. Nathan recognized the Athenian and sprang to his side, shouting to his followers to strike and spare not.

Into the midst of the confusion rushed the Hebrew women, seeking the children who had been taken from them. The uproar of conflict gave way to the lamentations of mothers whose infants had been slaughtered.

Others, more fortunate, sat with their babes in their arms, kissing them and feeling them over to discover whether they had been hurt. One young wife sat upon the steps at Clearchus' feet with her first-born and only child. Nathan recognized her as the woman who had been struck down by the priest in the market-place. The baby had been strangled and was dead.

"Hush!" she said, in a crooning voice, and, covering the child's head with her garment, she pressed its lips to her breast. For an instant she sat there, but the chill of the waxen mouth struck through her heart. She gave a startled glance at the baby's face, and then sprang up with a scream of despair and rushed out of the temple into the tempest, with the poor little body clasped in her arms.

Nathan called to Chares and Leonidas. "Alexander is on the wall," he said. "The streets are filled with the Tyrians. We must escape as we came. Listen!"

He held up his hand, and the Greeks became aware of a dull roaring that filled the city like the humming of a gigantic hive of bees.

"Even here we shall not be safe," Nathan continued. "Let us seek the secret passage."

"Chares!" cried one from among the women, and Thais ran forward, with her saffron robe torn so that half her perfect breast was exposed. She carried a dagger in her hand, and its blade was red; but her face shone with joy. The weapon fell from her grasp as she sprang to the Theban, who lifted her like a child in his arms and kissed her.

"Come," he said, as he set her down, "let us go."

Turning their backs upon the throng of the living and the dead, they descended into the secret passage and closed the entrance behind them.

CHAPTER XLVII

SYPHAX SQUARES HIS ACCOUNT

King Azemilcus stood at a window of his chamber, with the aged chancellor at his side, looking out across the parapet of the wall.

They were alone in the room, for the king had ordered his guard to await his commands in an outer apartment. The window opened directly upon the top of the wall, to which the royal palace was joined. Often during his long reign had the old king stood there, revolving his schemes in his cunning brain, while the salt breeze cooled his temples.

Beneath his feet the stones trembled with the shock of the great battering rams that were enlarging the breach in the wall west of the palace. In his ears sounded the tumult of the attack upon the two harbors, where the Macedonian triremes were seeking to break the barriers of chains. He saw the Tyrian soldiers upon the battlements, fighting against hope, with the valor of desperation.

The roar of falling masonry told him that the rams had done their work.

The breach had become a wide gap, extending beyond the ends of the inner wall that had been built to block the assault. The vessels lying in wait drew nearer. Flights of arrows and volleys of stones, great and small, swept the defences. Troop-ships, provided with drawbridges at their prows, closed in at the breach. The bridges fell, and streams of men in armor began to flow across them. They gained the breach and held it. They scaled the slope of fallen blocks and reached the top of the wall. The Tyrians were forced backward or hurled into the sea.

"That must be Alexander," the king remarked, noting the irresistible vigor of the assault.

"Yes," the chancellor replied, "those are his plumes."

Alexander indeed was leading the charge along the wall toward the palace, fighting in the forefront as his custom was, while the shield-bearing guards pressed forward where he led. Their triumphant voices shouted his name. At one of the towers upon the wall, between the breach and the palace, the Tyrians made a stand, seeking to check the advance of their foes. The Macedonians hunted them out and drove them to the next tower. The battle raged in mid-air, and the bodies of the slain fell either into the sea on one side or into the streets of the city on the other.

"They will enter here," Azemilcus said. "I think it is time to go."

"It is time!" the chancellor echoed, gazing upon the slaughter like a man under the spell of a horrible fascination.

The king led the way into the large hall where the guard was stationed.

It consisted of a company of a hundred men under the command of a young captain whose bronzed face and steady gaze showed that he was a veteran in service despite his youth. He had been pacing backward and forward before his men, who stood at attention along the wall. At sight of Azemilcus he paused and saluted. The old king placed a thin hand upon his shoulder.

"I am going to the Temple of Melkarth," he said. "Escort me thither."

The young man shook off the royal hand as though he felt contaminated by its touch.

"Does your Majesty really mean to seek refuge with the Alexandrine?" he asked indignantly.

"Yes," the king replied, "and I command you to come with me."

"Then I refuse!" the soldier exclaimed. "I have two brothers yonder on the wall, if they be still alive. The Macedonians will try to enter the palace, and if they succeed, the city is lost. Go you to Melkarth's temple if you will; but you go alone. We remain here."

Azemilcus looked at the handsome face, flushed with anger, and his inscrutable smile played about his lips.

"Thy father was my friend, and I have loved thee," he said. "I would save thee if I could, but youth is hot and hasty; have thy will if thou must."

He began to descend the broad staircase, followed by the trembling chancellor.

"There goes Tyre!" the young captain cried bitterly, "selfish and treacherous to the last. To the windows! We may yet save him honorably, though he does not deserve it."

They reached the seaward side of the palace in time to receive the remnants of the Tyrian companies that had vainly striven to defend the wall. The captain's brothers were not among the fugitives.

It had seemed to the young officer that the entrances to the palace from the wall might be held by a few men against any force that could be brought up; but it was not within human power to resist the onrush of the Macedonians. The captain was slain by Ptolemy; half his men fell with him, and the others fled down through the palace to the streets with the Macedonians at their heels.

The noise of the battle spread from the palace through the city. There was the clash of steel and the hoarse shouting of men at barricades; screams of women in fear and sharp cries of command mingled with the trampling of many feet. Save for the obstinate guard, the palace had been left unprotected by the crafty old king, who was awaiting his conqueror in the sanctuary of Melkarth's temple. Alexander led the way into the city with Hephaestion and Philotas. Ptolemy, Perdiccas, Clitus, Peithon, Glaucias, Meleager, Polysperchon, and a score more of his Companions and captains swept after him, heading the scarred veterans of Philip's wars,--phalangites, archers and javelin throwers, Thessalian cavalry riders, and heavy-armed mercenaries.

Then in the city of Tyre, whose name for centuries had been a synonym for power and pride, began a slaughter which lasted until nightfall.

Alexander ordered that the Israelites should not be molested and that none should enter with violence the Temple of Melkarth; but he did not seek to forbid his followers from taking revenge for the rigors and hardships of the long siege.

At first the Tyrians fought desperately from street to street and from square to square, falling back from one barrier to another; but this resistance served only to whet the rage that drove the Macedonians on.

Fresh troops constantly landed from the fleet and poured in through the palace. The breach in the wall became a gateway. The pitiless squadrons hunted the defenders from lane and housetop, cutting them to pieces.