probably for a great many years. There
is nothing whatever to be seen in the centre of this yard, which is
covered with accumulated sand far above its original level, and at the
sides, too, of the court, where buildings would have very likely been,
everything is smothered in sand up to a great height of the wall. In
other places the wall has collapsed altogether.

[Illustration: Towers of the Citadel, Zaidan.]

Remains of small rooms high up near the top of the wall can be seen. The
inside of the inner fort enclosed by the highest wall is quadrangular,
and has ten towers round it, eight of which are still in wonderful
preservation considering their age. Those at the angles of the quadrangle
had large, somewhat elongated, windows ending in a point cut into them in
two tiers, as may be seen in the illustration. Curiously enough, while
the windows were six feet in height, the doors were never more than five
feet. There were rooms in all the towers, but all were extremely small.
The largest averaged eight feet square. The walls of the towers were of
mud bricks with layers of kiln-baked bricks, and were three to four feet
deep and of very great strength.

As can be seen by the illustration, a fragment of an archway was to be
found on the summit of the wall and there were often signs that a covered
passage, such as may be found in other northern forts of this great city,
must have been in existence when the place was in all its glory.

As one stood on the highest point of the wall and looked around one
got a fair idea of the former immensity of the city. It evidently
stretched from south-east to north, forming an obtuse angle at the
citadel on which I stood. To the south-east of the fortress, where
sheltered from the terrific north winds and from the sand drifts, the
ruins were in better preservation and less covered with sand, which here
indeed made quite a depression, while the northern aspect now displays a
continuous mass of fine sand interrupted only by some of the higher
buildings projecting above it.

One could distinguish quite plainly where the wall of the city continued
for a long distance to the south-east with occasional towers, but this
portion of the wall, as seen in the illustration facing page 208, is now
in a sad state of decay and fast being covered with sand. The first three
hundred yards of it, which are the best preserved, however, will show
what a place of great strength Zaidan must have been. The to