It constitutes the apex of a triangular fort, and massy and lofty itself, it thus assumes a station of dignity and command. The annals of time are traced on it--here by the arrow-head still sticking,[29] there by the hollow of the shot and shell. It has borne the brunt of a score of sieges, and stands to-day without a single repair. On its summit, seventy feet from the ground, guns are planted. The terrace on the roof is cracked, but the surface is otherwise as smooth as if just finished. The pottery-pipes fitted in to carry away the water, are precisely such as might have been shipped from London. A semicircular arch supports a gallery on the inner side. A window opening in this gallery, now blocked up, is like a church window with the Gothic arch chamfered. The exterior was plastered in fine lime, and there are traces of its having been divided off into figures. It has now, by the barbarians in possession, been rubbed over with dirty brown to make it look _ancient_. The turrets on the walls below have been furbished up to look like cruet-stands, and the staring face of a clock[30] is stuck in a Saracen tower. The upper story only is explored and open; the flooring is perfectly smooth, and the roof stuccoed. There is a bath-room, and a mosque; the former has a figured aperture slanting through ten or twelve feet of wall to admit the light, as in the domes of Eastern baths. The other parts of the building are as much unknown as those of the unopened Pyramids. If these ruins had been in the hands of the tribe that live on the rock above, there would have been exhibited at least as much taste, and certainly more curiosity. The standing walls adjoining the towers exhibit faces of arches that covered in halls and surrounded courts. The second portion of the fort is at present used as a prison. The lower enclosure is of greater extent, and in the line of the wall is a remarkable Egyptian-looking building, square with buttresses at the angles and a pyramidal roof--roof and walls one mass of Moorish concrete (Tapia). It is as perfect as it was a thousand years ago, and may be equally so a thousand years hence. It is at present used as a powder-magazine, and is divided into two stories. The flooring of the upper hall is supported in the middle by a block of masonry some fifty feet square. This apartment is curiously ventilated. This Moorish fort is, as a whole, a building of great interest. An architect of the last century speaks of it as one of the most remarkable on the soil of Europe. It was no embellishment of, or defence for a capital; it was raised in time of trouble on a remote promontory as a protection for insurgents. It was antecedent to art in Europe,--the people who raised it did not imitate Rome; they must have brought this art with them. It stands a match for man and time, defying at once the inventions of the one and the ravages of the other.