For it was as it always is and always must be, where power and wealth
are masters of the scene, and there is no acting room for misery or
sorrow or such poor strolling players as sickness and death. The things
which please not the eye are quick to offend souls nursed in a
faultless taste, and the charnel-house of failure receives whatsoever
things have not the power of pleasing.
Now when they came to Nicaea, hope was high, and the light of victory
to come seemed to be shining in every man's eyes. There for the first
time Queen Eleanor led out her three hundred ladies in battle array,
clad in bright mail, with skirts of silk and cloth of gold, and long
white mantles, each with the scarlet cross upon the shoulder; and on
their heads they wore light caps of steel ornamented with chiselled
gold and silver, and here and there with a metal crest or a bird's
wing, beaten out of thin silver plate.
It was at noonday under the fair autumn sun. A broad meadow, green
still in patches, where the grass had not been burned brown by the
early summer heat, stretched toward the Lake of Ascanius, where the
ground rose in hillocks, to end abruptly in a sheer fall of thirty or
forty feet to the water's edge. There were places where there was no
grass at all, and where the dry gravel lay bare and dusty, yet on the
whole it was a fair field for a great assembly of men on horseback and
on foot. To southward the meadow rose, rolling away to the distant
hills, whither the German host was already gone.
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