from which I could see the entrance to the harbor and the white walls
of the Estrella battery hundreds of feet below; but as soon as I went
back into the maze of passages, chambers, and bastions on that level, I
lost all sense of direction, and five minutes later I could not tell
whether I was on the northern side of the castle or the southern side,
nor whether I was in the second of the three cubes of masonry or the
third.

The most surprising thing about the castle, to me, was its lack of
offensive power. Its massive stone walls gave it, of course, a certain
capacity for endurance, and even for resistance of a passive kind; but
it was almost as incapable of inflicting injury on an enemy as a Dutch
dike or a hillock of the mound-builders would be. Until I reached what,
for want of a better name, I shall have to call the roof of the
uppermost cube, I did not find anywhere a single round of ammunition,
nor a gun of any caliber, nor a casemate intended for a gun, nor an
embrasure from which a gun could have been fired. So far as
architectural adaptation to the conditions of modern warfare is
concerned, it was as harmless as an old Norman keep, and might have been
planned and built two centuries before guns were used or gunpowder
invented. I have been unable to ascertain the date of its erection; but
the city of Santiago was founded by Diego Velasquez in 1514, and all the
evidence furnished by the castle itself would seem to indicate that it
dates back to the sixteenth, or at latest to the seventeenth, century.
There is certainly nothing in its plan or in its appearance to show that
the engineers who designed it were acquainted even with the art of
fortification as developed in the seventeenth century by Vauban. It is
simply an old feudal castle, with moat, drawbridge, and portcullis,
built after the model of medieval strongholds before heavy
siege-ordnance came into general use. The idea that it could have done
any serious damage to Admiral Sampson's fleet seems absolutely ludicrous
when one has explored the interior of it and taken stock of its
antiquated, not to say obsolete and useless, armament.

After wandering about for half an hour in the two lower stories, I
climbed a crooked flight of stone steps, half blocked up with debris
from a shattered parapet above, and came out on the flat roof of the
highest and largest of the three cubes that together make up the
fortress. It was a spacious battlemented floor, of rect