hich look from a distance like square
port-holes, or embrasures, for heavy cannon, but which prove upon closer
examination to be doors leading to huge subterranean chambers, designed,
I presume, for the safekeeping of ammunition and explosives. At the time
when I went through them they contained nothing more dangerous than
condemned shovels and pickaxes, empty bottles, old tin cans, metal
lamps, dirty straw hats, discarded hammocks, and cast-off shoes. I found
nothing in the shape of ammunition except two or three dozen spherical
iron cannon-balls, which lay scattered over the rocky floor of the
esplanade, as if the soldiers of the garrison had been accustomed to
play croquet with them there, just to pass away the time in the
intervals between Admiral Sampson's bombardments.

After looking about the esplanade and exploring the dim recesses of the
gloomy ammunition-vaults, I climbed a crooked flight of disintegrating
stone steps and entered, between two massive quadrangular bastions,[6]
the lower story--if I may so call it--of the castle proper. As seen from
the ocean outside of the harbor, this ancient fortress appears to
consist of three huge cubes of gray masonry, superimposed one upon
another in such a manner as to present in profile the outline of three
rocky terraces; but whether this profile view gives anything like a
correct idea of the real shape of the building I am unable to say. From
the time when I entered the gateway at the head of the flight of stone
steps that led up from the esplanade, I was lost in a jumbled
aggregation of intercommunicating corridors, bastions, grated cells,
stairways, small interior courtyards, and huge, gloomy chambers, which I
could not mentally group or combine so as to reduce them to intelligible
order or bring them into anything like architectural harmony. The almost
complete absence of windows made it impossible to orient one's self by
glancing occasionally at some object of known position outside; the
frequent turns in the passages and changes of level in the floors were
very confusing; the small courtyards which admitted light to the
interior afforded no outlook, and I simply roamed from bastion to
bastion and from corridor to corridor, without knowing where I was, or
what relation the place in which I stood bore to the castle as a whole.
Now and then I would ascend a flight of stone steps at the side of a
courtyard and come out unexpectedly upon what seemed to be a flat roof,