all hours of the day diversify
the surface with an incessant play of light and shade. When perfect it
can hardly have been less than 40 feet in height. The walk round the
ramparts was crowned by a slight, low parapet, with rounded battlements,
and was reached by narrow staircases carefully constructed in the
thickness of the walls. A battlemented covering wall, about five and a
half yards high, encircled the building at a distance of some four feet.
The fortress itself was entered by two gates, and posterns placed at
various points between them provided for sorties of the garrison. The
principal entrance was concealed in a thick block of building at the
southern extremity of the east front. The corresponding entrance in
the covering wall was a narrow opening closed by massive wooden doors;
behind it was a small _place d'armes_, at the further end of which was
a second gate, as narrow as the first, and leading into an oblong court
hemmed in between the outer rampart and two bastions projecting at right
angles from it; and lastly, there was a gate purposely placed at the
furthest and least obvious corner of the court. Such a fortress was
strong enough to resist any modes of attack then at the disposal of the
best-equipped armies, which knew but three ways of taking a place by
force, viz. scaling, sapping, and breaking open the gates. The height
of the walls effectually prevented scaling. The pioneers were kept at
a distance by the brave, but if a breach were made in that, the small
flanking galleries fixed outside the battlements enabled the besieged to
overwhelm the enemy with stones and javelins as they approached, and to
make the work of sapping almost impossible. Should the first gate of
the fortress yield to the assault, the attacking party would be crowded
together in the courtyard as in a pit, few being able to enter together;
they would at once be constrained to attack the second gate under a
shower of missiles, and did they succeed in carrying that also, it was
at the cost of enormous sacrifice. The peoples of the Nile Valley
knew nothing of the swing battering-ram, and no representation of
the hand-worked battering-ram has ever been found in any of their
wall-paintings or sculptures; they forced their way into a stronghold
by breaking down its gates with their axes, or by setting fire to its
doors.

[Illustration: 304.jpg ATTACK UPON AN EGYPTIAN FORTRESS BY TROOPS OF
VARIOUS ARMS]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin,