lked up to the road leading to
the Estrella battery, and there stopped and looked about me. The cove
was completely shut in by high hills, and the only road or path leading
out of it, so far as I could see, was the one on which I stood. This
began, apparently, at the Estrella battery, ran around the head of the
cove, and then, turning to the right, climbed the almost precipitous
side of the Morro promontory, in a long, steep slant, to a height of one
hundred and fifty feet. There it made another turn which carried it out
of sight behind a buttress of rock under the northwestern corner of the
castle. Near the mouth of the cove, on my right, rose the white,
crenellated, half-ruined wall of the Estrella battery--a dilapidated
open stone fort of the eighteenth century, which contained no guns, and
which, judging from its appearance, had long been abandoned. It
occupied, however, a very strong position, and if the Spaniards had had
any energy or enterprise they would have put it in repair and mounted in
it a modern mortar which lay on a couple of skids near the pier, and two
or three small rapid-fire guns which they might have obtained from one
of Admiral Cervera's cruisers. Antiquated and obsolete as it was, it
might then have been of some use.

Near the head of the cove was an old ordnance storehouse, or magazine,
which proved upon examination to contain nothing more interesting than a
few ancient gun-carriages, a lot of solid six-inch projectiles, an
assortment of rammers and spongers for muzzle-loading cannon, and a few
wooden boxes of brass-jacketed cartridges for Remington rifles. Three
long smooth-bore iron culverins lay on the ground between this magazine
and the pier, but they had not been fired, apparently, in a century, and
were so eaten and pitted by rust that I could not find on them any
trace of inscription or date. There was nothing really useful,
effective, or modern, either in the Estrella battery or in the magazine,
except the Remington rifle-cartridges and the unmounted mortar.

Finding nothing else of interest in the vicinity of the cove, I started
up the road that led to the front or western face of Morro Castle. I
call it a "road" by courtesy, because it did show some signs of labor
and engineering skill; but it was broken every few yards into rude steps
by transverse ledges of tough, intractable rock, and how any wheeled
vehicle could ever have been drawn up it I cannot imagine. The fringe of
plants,