Pliny affirms that its erection cost a sum of money equal, at the present value, to about £390,000, and if this were true, we might not dispute some of the assertions of ancient writers in reference to its elevation and solidity. But the fact that it has entirely disappeared seems to disprove the dimensions they have assigned to it. We are wholly unable to decide whether the help it afforded to mariners was from a common fire or from a more complete system of illumination. The poet Lucan, in his “Pharsalia,” asserts that it indicated to Julius Cæsar his approach to Egypt on the seventh night after he sailed from Troy; and he makes use of the significant expression “lampada,” which could hardly be applied, even poetically, to an _open_ fire. Pliny expresses a fear lest its light, which, seen at a distance, had the appearance of flames, should, from its steadiness, be mistaken for a star (“periculum in continuatione ignium, ne sidus existimetur, quoniam è longinquo similis flammarum aspectus est”[8]); but assuredly he would not have spoken in such terms of the wavering, irregular, and fitful light of an ordinary fire. We conclude, therefore, that its lighting apparatus was more complete than has generally been supposed. [8] Pliny, “Hist. Nat.,” xxxvi. 18. When was this great monument destroyed? The most probable supposition seems to be that it fell into decay in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and that its ruin was hastened or completed by the iconoclastic and barbarian hands of the Turkish conquerors of Egypt. That it existed in the twelfth century, we know from the graphic description of Edrisi; a description which will enable the reader to reproduce it before his “mind’s eye” in all its pristine glory:— “This pharos,” he says, “has not its like in the world for skill of construction or for solidity; since, to say nothing of the fact that it is built of excellent stone of the kind called _kedan_, the layers of these stones are united by molten lead, and the joints are so adherent that the whole is indissoluble, though the waves of the sea from the north incessantly beat against it. From the ground to the middle gallery or stage the measurement is exactly seventy fathoms, and from this gallery to the summit, twenty-six.[9] [Illustration: ANCIENT PHAROS OF ALEXANDRIA.]