ge
remnants of the coatings of clay, painted yellow or white. Black
marks, the result of fire, upon the lower portion of the walls of the
other rooms which have been excavated, leave no doubt that their
floors were of wood, and were destroyed by fire. In one room there is
a wall in the form of a semicircle, which has been burnt as black as
coal. All the rooms as yet laid open, and not resting directly upon
the Tower, have been excavated down to the same level; and, without
exception, the _debris_ below them consists of red or yellow ashes and
burnt ruins. Above these, even in the rooms themselves, were found
nothing but either red or yellow wood-ashes, mixed with bricks that
had been dried in the sun and subsequently burnt by the conflagration,
or black _debris_, the remains of furniture, mixed with masses of
small shells: in proof of this there are the many remains which are
still hanging on the walls.

A very large ancient building was found standing upon the wall or
buttress. At this place the wall appears to be about seventy-nine feet
wide, or thick. The site of this building, upon an elevation, together
with its solid structure, leave no doubt that it was the grandest
building in Troy; nay, that it must have been the Palace of Priam.
This edifice, now first laid open from beneath the ashes which covered
it in the burning of the city, was found by Dr. Schliemann in the very
state to which, in Homer, Agamemnon threatens to reduce it: "The house
of Priam _blackened with fire_."

Upon this house, by the side of the double gate, upon Ilium's Great
Tower, at the edge of the western slope of the Acropolis, sat Priam,
the seven elders of the city, and Helen; and this is the scene of the
most splendid passage in the Iliad:

"Attending there on aged Priam, sat
The Elders of the city; ...
All these were gathered at the Scaean Gates.
... so on Ilion's Tower
Sat the sage chiefs and counselors of Troy.
Helen they saw, as to the Tower she came."

From this spot the company surveyed the whole plain, and saw at the
foot of the Acropolis the Trojan and the Achaean armies face to face,
about to settle their agreement to let the war be decided by a single
combat between Paris and Menelaus.

"Upon _Seamander's flowery mead_ they stood
Unnumbered as _the vernal leaves and flowers_."

The description which Homer gives of the Tower of Ilium, and the
incidents connected with it, corresponds so clos