Word: fortress
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...there they were, right in front of the 24-year-old fortress with three times the floor space of the Empire State Building where the Defense Department lives and where the sportcoated Secretary of Defense was watching them out of his window...
Assembled in battle array below the great rock fortress of Masada, the 5,000 men of the Roman Tenth Legion begin their charge, superbly equipped and ready for the task ahead. Above them, behind the ramparts of the fort, 967 Jewish Zealots brace for a last desperate defense. The setting is not the western shore of the Dead Sea, where the outnumbered Zealots committed mass suicide in A.D. 73 rather than surrender to the Romans, but Manhattan's Jewish Museum, where a panoramic display of exquisitely detailed models will open this week depicting the last days of Masada...
...lengthy account of the battle of Masada, Historian Flavius Josephus described in meticulous detail the participants, the strategy, the topography and Masada's elaborate buildings. Modern historians had little else to go on in their studies of Masada; because of its inaccessible location and difficult terrain, the fortress until recently had been only partially probed by archaeologists. Between 1963 and 1965, however, Masada was subjected to its second great siege-by diggers, not soldiers...
Aided by this raw manpower-which included a violin maker, elephant and horse trainers, models, doctors and a midwifery expert-the expedition leader, Israeli Archaeologist Yigael Yadin, was able to complete 97% of Masada's excavation. Small portions of the fortress were left untouched to provide visitors with a before-and-after view of the site...
They live in crude, sandbagged underground bunkers where often the only light comes from an improvised candle with a rag as a wick. There are no connecting trenches; the leathernecks, some of them raw teenagers, must move at a run from bunker to bunker. Where once a crude French fortress stood, not a single building or even a tent breaks the bleak horizon. Often the only signs of life are a horde of bold rats and a few cats. "The men think they keep the rats down," grumbled one officer. "I suspect they share the garbage...