distant objects and
intensify every hue.

A closer approach to the citadel which lies within the landlocked
harbor reveals in detail the features of the stupendous walls which
guard this key to Spain's former treasure house. Their immensity and
their marvelous construction bear witness to the genius of her famous
military engineers, and evoke the same admiration as do the great
temples and monuments of ancient Egypt. These grim walls, in places
sixty feet through, and pierced by numerous gates, are frequently
widened into broad esplanades, and set here and there with bastions
and watch towers to command strategic points. At the north end of the
city they expand into an elaborately fortified citadel, within which
are enormous fresh water tanks, formerly supplied by the rains, and
made necessary by the absence of springs so near the coast. Within the
walls at various points one finds the now abandoned barracks,
storerooms, and echoing dungeons, the latter in the days of the
stirring past too often pressed into service by the Holy Inquisition.
Underground tunnels, still intact, lead from the walls to the
Cathedral, the crumbling fortress of San Felipe de Barajas, and the
deserted convent on the summit of La Popa. Time-defying, grim,
dramatic reliques of an age forever past, breathing poetry and romance
from every crevice--still in fancy echoing from moldering tower and
scarred bulwark the clank of sabre, the tread of armored steed, and
the shouts of exulting _Conquistadores_--aye, their ghostly echoes
sinking in the fragrant air of night into soft whispers, which bear to
the tropical moon dark hints of ancient tragedies enacted within these
dim keeps and gloom-shrouded tunnels!

The pass of Boca Grande--"large mouth"--through which Drake's band of
marauders sailed triumphantly in the latter part of the sixteenth
century, was formerly the usual entrance to the city's magnificent
harbor. But its wide, deep channel, only two miles from the city
walls, afforded too easy access to undesirable visitors in the heyday
of freebooters; and the harassed Cartagenians, wearied of the
innumerable piratical attacks which this broad entrance constantly
invited, undertook to fill it up. This they accomplished after years
of heroic effort and an enormous expenditure of money, leaving the
harbor only the slender, tortuous entrance of Boca Chica--"little
mouth"--dangerous to incoming vessels because of the almost torrential
flow of the tid