has to be taken in the use of words, never using them before the epoch in which they came into the general circulation of ideas, otherwise we shall immediately be accused of an anachronism, which, amongst the reprehensible acts in the terrain of writing, is second only to plagiarism. In fact, if we had been as important a nation then as we are today, then it would not have been necessary to wait three centuries for Machiavelli to enrich the practice and vocabulary of political astuteness, and without further ado, we would describe this ingenious stroke as obsolete, Allah is the one and only God cries the muezzin, and, as one man, the Portuguese, shouting their heads off to summon their courage, advance steadily on the city gates, even though the most ordinary observer, so long as he is impartial, could not fail to notice a certain lack of conviction in the advancing armies, as if disbelieving that with so little they might get so far. It is true that the bows and the crossbows fired a veritable shower of arrows and other missiles over the battlements in order to drive back the guards and to give some respite to the assailants on the front line so that they might attempt to break down the gates with axes and hammers, while others, manning the heavy battering-rams, push them forward in a regular rhythm, but the Moors refused to give way, firstly because they were protected by the shelters they had built, and then, when these began to burn, set alight by flaming torches tied to the larger javelins, they came crashing down on to the heads of the Portuguese, who were forced to retreat, scorched like pigs after slaughter. Once they had put out some of the more dangerous fires, which meant that some of Mem Ramires's soldiers had to dive into the waters of the estuary, from where they emerged shivering and pleading for ointments, the artillery launched another barrage of missiles, this time more cautious, and preferring to use stones and missiles of hardened clay, for those fiendishly wicked Moors hit us back with our own munitions, causing at least one Portuguese soldier to die, showing that no man escapes his destiny, when a javelin was thrown back which he himself had been the first to aim.
From the balcony of the minaret, the muezzin heard the fateful turmoil, so different from the uproar of animated voices that had reached his ears in that very same spot, when the crusaders departed. This time he did not need to come rushing down to find out what was happening, he knew all too well that the battle was starting up again after the pause following the loss of the nearby suburb, but he was not worried, the cries he heard coming from his brethren were not those of despair and defeat, but of courage, that is how they sounded to him, and he knew he was right because, being blind, he had been compensated with the keenest of hearing which did not abandon him even in old age. On the other minarets throughout the city, the muezzins were probably hearing the same uproar, some six, eight, ten blind men assigned to other mosques and perched between heaven and earth in total darkness. All of them were responsible for this attack, they were the ones who had given the order, but, innocent as they were, they did not connect the words spoken with their obvious effect, each of them no doubt saying to himself, what a coincidence, and preferring to think, as the echoes of their holy summons to prayer continued to hover in the air, although already mingled with the howls and curses of the combatants, that it was as if the palpable presence of Allah were protecting the city, an enormous cupola made from the myriads of other vibrant little cupolas that were descending all the way down the slope from the castle as far as the river, while all around, the God of the Christians appears to have been lacking in enough shields to defend his sceptical soldiers from the missiles raining down from on high. Startled by the commotion, dogs are barking on these slopes, they run for shelter and start burying bones, their instinct must serve some purpose when even people endowed with judgment can foretell evil times ahead.
This allusion to Moorish dogs, that is to say, the dogs that still lived with the Moors at the time, clearly in their condition as the most impure of animals, but who would soon begin to feed with their foul flesh on the emaciated bodies of the human creatures of Allah, this allusion, as we were saying, reminded Raimundo Silva of the dog on the Escadinhas de'Sao Crispim, unless, on the other hand, it was an unconscious memory on his part, that led to the introduction of the allegorical picture with that brief commentary about judgment and instinct. As a rule, Raimundo Silva boards the tram at the Portas do Sol, although the distance is greater, and he comes back the same way. If we were to ask him why he does it, he would reply that because he has such a sedentary occupation, it is good for him to walk, but that is not entirely true, the fact is that he would not mind descending the hundred and thirty-four steps, gaining time and benefiting from those sixty-seven flections of each knee, if, out of male pride, he did not also feel obliged to climb up them with the inevitable weariness everyone suffers if they pass this way, as we can see from the small number of mountaineers around. A reasonable compromise would be to go down that way as far as the Porta de Ferro and come back up by the longer but easier route, but to do this would mean acknowledging, all too clearly, that his lungs and legs are no longer what they were, a mere assumption, because the period when Raimundo Silva was in his prime does not come into this history of the siege of Lisbon. On the two or three occasions that he took this route down in recent weeks, Raimundo Silva did not encounter the dog, and thought to himself that, tired of waiting for even the barest ration from the miserly neighbours, the dog had emigrated to richer pastures, or had simply given up the ghost when it could wait no longer. He remembered his act of charity and told himself that he could have done it more often, but when it comes to dogs, you know what it is like, they live with the fixation of acquiring a master, to encourage and feed them is to have them at your feet for evermore, they stare at us with that neurotic anxiety and there is no other solution than to put a collar round their neck, pay for a licence and take them home. The alternative would be to leave them to die of hunger, so slowly that there would be no room for remorse, and, if possible, on the Escadinhas de'Sao Crispim, where no one ever passes.
News arrived that another burial site had been consecrated on a plain facing the fortress, beneath the slope on the left-hand side of the royal encampment, because of the work involved in transporting corpses across ravines and marshes as far as the Monte de'Sao Fransisco, who arrived more battered than a load offish and, in this hot weather, smelling worse than the living. As with this new site for burial, the cemetery of'Sao Vicente is divided into two sections, Portuguese on one side, foreigners on the other, to all appearances a waste of space yet responding, in the final analysis, to that desire for occupation inherent in human nature, and in this sense serving both the living and the dead. When his hour comes, knight Heinrich will end up here, for whom that other hour is at hand when he will prove the tactical excellence of the assault towers, now that direct attacks on gates and walls have met with failure, the first item on the strategic plan. What he does not know, nor could anyone have told him, is that the moment the hopeful eyes of the soldiers are upon him, with the exception of the envious who already existed even then, this very moment, on the threshold of glory, will be that of his unfortunate death, unfortunate in military terms, let's say, because to that other and greater glory, was finally destined he who had come from so far away. But let us not precipitate. The thirty native casualties who lost their lives during the attempted assault on the Porta de Ferro still have to be buried, their corpses will be transported by boat to the other bank of the estuary then carried uphill on improvised litters made from rough pieces of wood. On the edge of the common grave they will be stripped of any clothing that might be used by the living, unless they are much too bloodstained, and even these will be snatched up by the less scrupulous and squeamish, so that generally speaking the dead are lowered into their grave as naked as the earth that receives them.
Lined up, with their bare feet touching the first fringe of mud kept moist and soft by the high tides and waves, the corpses are subjected to the stares and taunts of the victorious Moors up on the battlements, as they he there waiting to be carried on board. There is some delay in transporting them because there are more volunteers than are actually needed, which may seem surprising when the task is so painful and lugubrious, even if we take into account the enticement of being rewarded with clothing, but in fact everyone is trying to get hired as a boatman or drover, because just recently, there alongside the cemetery, prostitutes have gathered from the ravines and outlying districts where they were awaiting the outcome of the war, if it were to be a case of
And now let us take a little stroll past this line-up of filthy, bloodstained corpses, lying shoulder to shoulder as
