It takes a good while to see it all, for new stories and stairways, wings and terraces, are constantly cropping out in unexpected places, but as it occupies three sides of the rounding cliff and the pilot who comes aboard at the entrance to the channel guides your steamer close up under the frowning battlements, you have ample time to study it. Window holes cut into rock in all directions show how extensive are the excavations. A large garrison is always quartered here, even in time of peace, when their sole business is searching for shady places along the walls against which to lean. There are ranges above ranges of walks, connected by stairways cut into the solid rock, each range covered with lolling soldiers. You pass so near that you can hear them chattering together. Those on the topmost parapet, dangling their blue woolen legs over, are so high and so directly overhead that they remind you of flies on the ceiling. In various places small niches have been excavated in the cliff, some with crucifixes, or figures of saints, and in other places the bare, unbroken wall of rock runs up, sheer straight 100 feet. Below, on the ocean side, are caves, deep, dark and uncanny, worn deep into the rock. Some of them are so extensive that they have not been explored in generations. The broad and lofty entrances to one of them, hollowed by the encroaching sea, is as perfect an arch as could be drawn by a skillful architect, and with it a tradition is connected which dates back a couple of centuries. A story or two above these wave-eaten caverns are many small windows, each heavily barred with iron. They are dungeons dug into the solid rock, and over them might well be written, "Leave hope behind, ye who enter here!" A crowd of haggard, pallid faces are pressed against the bars; and as you steam slowly by, so close that you might speak to the wretched prisoners, it seems as if a shadow had suddenly fallen upon the bright sunshine, and a chill, like that of coming death, oppresses the heart. Since time out of mind, the Moro of Santiago has furnished dungeons for those who have incurred the displeasure of the government infinitely more to be dreaded than its namesake in Havana. Had these slimy walls a tongue, what stories they might reveal of crime and suffering, of tortures nobly undergone, of death prolonged through dragging years and murders that will not "out" until the judgment day. Against that old tower, a quarter of a century ago our countrymen of the Virginius were butchered like sheep. Scores of later patriots have been led out upon the ramparts and shot, their bodies, perhaps, with life yet in them, falling into the sea, where they were snapped up by sharks as soon as they touched the water.