Looking towards the sea the view embraced the northern portions, the old port and the new separated from each other by a gigantic mole seven stadia in extent which united the island of Pharos with the city. At the eastern extremity of this island rose the lighthouse, an immense octagon tower of two stories, one hundred and eleven meters in height, and built wholly of white marble. Around the vast port, from Cape Lochias to the Heptastadium, extended a noble line of piers along which arose palaces and temples. Edifices of pure Greek style stood side by side with Egyptian buildings and other magnificent ones in which both styles of architecture had combined their elements, relieving the utter plainness of Semitic art by ornaments of the Hellenic order, alternating Corinthian columns with campaniform, and uniting the acanthus leaf with the papyrus flower. Perspectives of cloisters ended in apses of marble exedræ; at the extremity of long avenues of sphinxes gigantic pylons raised their pyramidal masses, where painted on white screens filed on processions of figures, and the entablature of which bore the emblematic disk with the great wings unfolded. Here a Greek temple presented a pediment sculptured in Parian marble; there an Egyptian temple, vast, squat, mysterious, showed its granite mass whose quadrangular pillars bore on the four faces of their cubic capitals the head of the god Hathor. On terraces covered with beds of roses, and shaded by sycamores, mimosas, and palms, rose palaces surrounded by porticos supported by columns of lotus form, alleys of pylons, pavilions in the form of conic towers, open kiosks, tribunes supported by caryatides. In the squares, at the junction of the streets, before the great edifices arose sculptured heads of Mercury, Osirian colossi, statues of the Greek gods, altars, heroums, dominated at intervals by lofty obelisks and tall masts fixed in the ground whose many colored flags fluttered in the breeze. Among these endless monuments would first be noticed, at the extremity of the cape, the temple of Isis Lochias, and a noble royal villa; then before the Closed Port of the Kings the shipyards and the arsenal buildings. There began the Bruchium. Enclosed by lofty walls and hanging gardens the Bruchium was a city within the city—the City of the Ptolemies. Each of the Lagidæ had built a palace, erected a temple, opened gushing fountains, planted groves of acacias and sycamores, created ponds where bloomed water-lilies, and the blue lotus flower. Strabo applied to the monuments of the Bruchium the line of the Odyssey: “One produces the other.” Near the various palaces of the kings and their vast appurtenances arose the temple of Chronos, the temple of Isis Pelusia, the lesser Serapium, the temple of Poseidon [Neptune], the gymnasium with its porticos of a stadium in extent, the theater, the covered gallery, the library containing seven hundred thousand volumes.