Only when the sun had sunk were his engineers able to make any progress, and the following day this was undone by renewed forays against their works. After some days of this he decided to change his position, the tents were struck and the army was on the march. For a brief spell the people of Jerusalem imagined that the Sultan had abandoned the siege and that the city was freed of the Saracen menace. Men and women ran to the churches to give thanks for their deliverance and the city resounded with shouts of joy and triumph. All the more cruel the awakening on the morrow to see the besiegers in full force at the north of the city, where the walls were weakest, their mangonels already in place at one of the angles and mines established under one wall overlooking the Kidron Valley to the east. Now it was the soldiers on the walls who had the sun in their eyes. Soon a breach in the wall was widening, and the arrows were descending like rain upon the ramparts so that not a single soldier dared show himself there. In two days a hundred feet of the outer wall had been mined and, when this was fired, it fell into the moat. Even the most optimistic now gave up hope, and at a council with Balian and the Patriarch, the former expressed the final decision of a valiant soldier. This was to lead a forlorn hope that night against the besiegers, for he had no fear to die in honorable battle, but he did object to being shamefully killed after the city had been taken. That he would rather die there where Jesus Christ had died for them than to