A closer inspection shows walls dotted with dark apertures. These are windows; but they suggest the black nest-holes that sand-martins make on the face of a cliff. There are faint touches of colour too, a heap of rust-tinted roofs, a grey church tower, a splash of red to mark the nave, the brown ruin of a castle like a broken and jagged pot, a tiny ledge of green with a line of white stones to mark the burying place. A zigzag path mounts up to an arched gateway in the face of the wall. It is the only entrance into Eze. This portal will admit a laden mule or a hand-cart but not a carriage; for no “vehicle” can find admittance into this exclusive town. A curve of smoke alone shows that it is inhabited. In the distance is the blue Mediterranean lying in the sun. Before entering Eze it is well to remember that it is an ancient place in the last stages of decrepitude and decay and that it has had a terrible history and centuries of sorrow. It is poor, half empty and partly ruinous. Those who expect to find a mediæval fortress will be disappointed since its houses differ but little from such as exist in many an old neighbouring town; while those who are unaware of its past may adopt the expression of a tourist I met, leaving the rock, who informed his friend—as a piece of considered criticism—that Eze was “a rotten hole.” Such a man would, no doubt, describe Jerusalem also as “a rotten hole.” The gate of Eze—the Moor’s Gate as it is still called—is supported by a double tower with evil-looking loop-holes. It is very old and very worn. Its machicolations are covered with ferns which make its harsh front almost tender. Within this entry is another gate and a second tower upon which is a commonplace house reached by a flight of steps. Here we stand in an ancient feudal fortress. Here is the station of the guard and here has taken place such hand-to-hand fighting and such slaughter of men as should make the walls shudder to all eternity. It was here that the stand was made by the faithful garrison when the last siege of Eze took place, the siege led by Barbarossa in 1543. It was at this very gate that the traitor Gaspard de Caïs parleyed with the governor. Within the second gate is a platform for the inner guard, from the ramparts of which one can look down into the chasm from which Eze arises and judge of the formidable position of the place. The streets of Eze are mediæval in arrangement being mere alleys—each as narrow as a trench—between the houses. They are paved with cobble stones at the sides and with red bricks in the centre and are lit—such is the anomaly—by electric light. These lanes wander about in an uneasy and disconsolate way. They sometimes mount upwards; they sometimes glide down as if undecided. They dip under houses through black, vaulted ways: they lead to stone stairs that disappear round a corner: they turn warily to the right and then to the left, as if someone followed.