LIII. Kawad was still fighting against Amid, and striving and labouring to set up again the mule that had fallen in. He ordered the Persians to fill it up with stones and beams, and to bring cloths of hair and wool and linen, and make them into bags or sacks, and fill them with earth, and pile them up on the mule which they had made, so that it might be raised quickly against the wall. Then the Amidenes constructed a machine which the Persians named "the Crusher", because it thwarted all their labour and destroyed themselves. For the Amidenes cast with this engine huge stones, each of which weighed more than three hundred pounds; and so the cotton awning under which the Persians concealed themselves was rent in pieces, and those who were standing beneath it were crushed. The battering ram too was broken by the constant shower of stones which were cast without cessation; for the Amidenes were not able to damage the Persians so much in any other way as by means of large stones, because of the cotton awning which was folded many times over (the mule). Upon this the Persians used to pour water, and it could neither be damaged by arrows on account of its thickness, nor by fire because it was damp. But these large stones that were hurled from "the Crusher" destroyed both awning and men and weapons. In this way the Persians were discomfited, and gave up working at the mule, and took counsel to return to their own country, because, during the three months that they had sat before it, 50,000 of them had perished in the battles that were fought daily both by night and day. But the Amidenes became overconfident in their victory, and fell into careless ways, and did not guard the wall with the same diligence as before. On the 10th of the month of the latter Kanun (January) the guardians of the wall drank a great deal of wine because of the cold, and when it was night, they fell asleep and were sunk in a heavy slumber; and some of them quitted their posts, because it was raining, and went down to seek shelter in their houses. Whether then through this remissness, as we think, or by an act of treachery, as people said, or as a chastisement from God, the Persians got possession of the walls of Amid by means of a ladder, without the gates being opened or the wall breached. They laid waste the city, and sacked all the property in it, and trampled the eucharist under foot, and mocked at its service, and stripped bare its churches, and led its inhabitants into captivity, except the old and the maimed and those who hid themselves. They left there a garrison of three thousand men, and all (the rest) of them went down to the mountains of Shigar. That the Persians who remained might not be annoyed by the smell of the dead bodies of the Amidenes, they carried them out and piled them up in two heaps outside of the north gate. The number of those who were carried out by the north gate was more than 80,000; besides those whom they led forth alive and stoned outside of the city, and those whom they stabbed on the top of the mule that they had constructed, and those who were thrown into the Tigris (Deklath), and those who died by all sorts of deaths, regarding which we are unable to speak.