Of all the cities I have seen in my peregrinations up and down the globe, none can boast a setting so romantic, a situation so utterly amazing, as Constantine. Nature must have intended it for a fortress, else she would not have guarded it with walls a thousand feet in height nor have encircled it on three sides with a moat which takes the form of a stupendous chasm, leaving the fourth side connected with the surrounding country only by a narrow isthmus. Constantine’s extraordinary aspect is due to the erosion of the soft limestone rock on which it stands by the River Rummel, which, roaring down from the heights of the Aurés, sweeps around three sides of the city through a deep and narrow C-shaped gorge, the sheer walls of which are at one point only fifteen feet apart. The lofty plateau-peninsula thus created is about a thousand yards square and so crowded with houses that many of them overhang the brink of the giddy abyss, their hold on the rock being so precarious that it seems as though a heavy wind would blow them off. But the grandeur of the gorge and the immense height of its walls dwarf the works of man into insignificance; the effect produced by this amazing pedestal of rock holding aloft a city is so overwhelming in its majesty and impressiveness that one scarcely notices the houses clinging to its brow or the river tumbling at its feet. The Rummel, sweeping down from the sunny country-side to the south, from the grain-fields and olive-groves, from the wooded hill-slopes and the snowy peaks beyond, plunges suddenly into the shadows of the huge vertical cliffs which gird the town to thunder beneath a series of enormous natural arches or to lose itself for a time in gloomy bat-infested caverns, only to emerge into the dazzling sunlight again hundreds of yards further on, finally flinging itself recklessly over a lofty precipice, amid a smother of spray and spume, into the lovely valley below, down which it meanders, subdued and placid now, on its long journey through the Djurjuras to the sea. From the town it is difficult and dangerous to peer into the depths, for the overhanging cliffs are exceedingly slippery and treacherous, as more than one Arab has discovered at the cost of his life, though hasheesh addicts will frequently descend these same precipices at the imminent risk of breaking their necks in order to enjoy the forbidden drug without interference from the police. On the other side, however, the gorge is followed for its entire length of the Corniche Road, a superb example of highway engineering, here consisting of a narrow shelf blasted from the living rock, there supported above the giddy chasm on buttresses of masonry, in places built around the rocky shoulders of the gorge, in others tunneled through them.