Haifa; or, Life in modern PalestineOliphant, Laurence
History
Haifa; or, Life in modern Palestine
Oliphant, Laurence
Palestine -- Description and travel
The most striking features of the ruins of Cæsarea are the Crusading
castle and the old Roman mole. The former is built upon a long, narrow
reef or breakwater, partly artificial, which runs out into the sea for
one hundred and sixty yards, forming the southern side of the harbour,
while the northern side is formed by a sort of mole or jetty more than
two hundred feet long, which is composed of some sixty or seventy
prostrate columns lying side by side in the water like rows of stranded
logs. They are from five to twenty feet in length, and average about
eighteen inches in diameter. I never in my life before saw such an array
of granite pillars so closely piled together or used for such a purpose.
Indeed, to judge by those which remain, Cæsarea must have been a city of
columns. The crusaders used them to thorough-bind their walls, from
which the butts project like rows of cannon from the side of a
man-of-war. They must have built many hundreds of old Roman columns thus
into their fortification.
The Crusading wall enclosing the town rises from a moat which is about
forty feet wide, but, being much filled in with rubbish, is not more
than five or six feet deep. The wall itself is about nine feet thick,
with buttresses at intervals which are from thirty to fifty feet long
and project from twenty to twenty-six feet; but it is especially in the
castle and donjon, which is built out into the sea on the projecting
reef, that the columns are used as thorough-bonds. Some of these are of
red granite, others of gray. The Bosnian colonists are perching a _café_
on the ruins of the old donjon, immediately above two magnificent
prostrate columns of red granite, nine feet long and four in diameter. I
observed here also a finely polished block of red granite over six feet
square and three feet six inches thick. There is also a curious double
tessellated pavement, evidently of two periods, as the upper tesseræ are
at least six inches above the lower ones. I am afraid, as the masons are
working immediately above them, they will soon disappear, as will also a
beautiful carved capital in white marble. I scrambled up to the top of
this picturesque ruin, where the rib of the groined roof of the upper
chamber still remains supported on a corbel in the form of a human head,
and looked out of the pointed, arched window sheer down seventy feet on
the sea, beating against the base of the sea wall. The mouth of the
small artificial harbour is about two hundred yards across, but the
latter is too much exposed and too small ever to be of much value.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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