But we must resume our journey eastward towards the famous "Rock." There at last it is! There "dawns Gibraltar grand and gray," though Mr. Browning strains poetic license very hard in making it visible even "in the dimmest north-east distance," to a poet who was at that moment observing how "sunset ran one glorious blood-red recking into Cadiz Bay." We, at any rate, are far enough away from Cadiz before it dawns upon us in all its Titanic majesty of outline; grand, of course, with the grandeur of Nature, and yet with a certain strange air of human menace as of some piece of Atlantean ordnance planted and pointed by the hand of man. This "armamental" appearance of the Rock--a look visible, or at any rate imaginable in it, long before we have approached it closely enough to discern its actual fortifications, still less its artillery--is much enhanced by the dead flatness of the land from which its western wall arises sheer, and with which by consequence it seems to have no closer physical connection than has a gun-carriage with the parade ground on which it stands. As we draw nearer this effect increases in intensity. The surrounding country seems to sink and recede around it, and the Rock appears to tower ever higher and higher, and to survey the Strait and the two continents, divided by it with a more and more formidable frown. As we approach the port, however, this impression gives place to another, and the Rock, losing somewhat of its "natural-fortress" air, begins to assume that resemblance to a couchant lion which has been so often noticed in it. Yet alas! for the so-called famous "leonine aspect" of the famous height, or alas! at least for the capricious workings of the human imagination! For while to the compiler of one well-reputed guidebook, the outlines of Gibraltar seem "like those of a lion asleep, and whose head, somewhat truncated, is turned towards Africa as if with a dreamy and steadfast deep attention;" to another and later observer the lion appears to have "his kingly head turned towards Spain, as if in defiance of his former master, every feature having the character of leonine majesty and power!" The truth is, of course, that the Rock assumes entirely different aspects, according as it is looked at from different points of view. There is certainly a point from which Gibraltar may be made, by the exercise of a little of Polonius's imagination, to resemble some couchant animal with its head turned towards Africa--though "a head somewhat truncated," is as odd a phrase as a "body somewhat decapitated"--and contemplating that continent with what we may fancy, if we choose, to be "dreamy and steadfast attention." But the resemblance is, at best, but a slender one, and a far-fetched. The really and strikingly leonine aspect of Gibraltar is undoubtedly that which it presents to the observer as he is steaming towards the Rock from the west, but has not yet come into full view of the slope on which the town is situated.