ctural
beauty. It was built of an ugly dark stone, was strongly fortified,
and was flanked by outlying batteries which surrounded the mouth of the
defile which led from Zetta on the frontier. The artillery of to-day
would reduce the fortress of Itzia to a rubbish heap in less than an
hour; but it was a strong place for the date of its erection, and even
now the difficulty of bringing siege guns along the broken and difficult
mountain pathways makes it worth calculating as a point of resistance
against invasion.

I saw it first at the close of a dull day when a storm was brewing. The
sky was overcast, and the clouds were mustering fast from the south in
black battalions. Every now and then a hoarse echoing rumble of sound
went wandering about in the hollows of the hills with a deep cavernous
tone, which sounded astonishingly threatening and foreboding. I suppose
that everybody knows more or less the feeling which associates itself
with the first view of any memorable place, and fixes itself as it were
upon his recollection of it. After all these years I can hardly think
of the fortress at Itzia without some return of the depression and
half-dismay which fell upon me when I first looked at it, with the black
clouds gathering thickly over it, the mountain on which it stood
looking as if it would topple over and bury fortress and valley, and one
spear-like gleam of bleak sunshine lighting up a few of its windows
and a few square yards of its western wall. Of course I had never
been guilty of such a madness as to think of approaching the place by
anything but wile and stratagem; and its bulk and blackness and the
thickness of its walls had nothing in the world to do with the success
or failure of my enterprise, and yet I could not resist a feeling of
discouragement which almost amounted to a sense of superstition.

We had engaged a guide from some little village, the name of which I
forget, at which we had rested on the previous night; and the castle was
the first object to which he had called our attention.

"There!" he cried, pausing at a sudden bend in the road, and turning
half round upon us with his right hand pointing forward. "There is the
fortress of Itzia. The end of your journey, gentlemen."

I spoke the language very feebly, but I happened to understand every
word he said, and his speech gave me a nervous chill. It was not
altogether unlikely that the end of our journey lay in that forbidding
heap of dark ston