do not all
appear to the water; on the contrary, one sees from thence one vast high
hill and rock, with buildings arising above one another, and that in so
steep and almost perpendicular a manner, that they all seem to have but
one foundation.

As the houses, convents, churches, &c., are large, and all built with
white stone, they look very beautiful at a distance; but as you approach
nearer, and find them to want every kind of ornament, all idea of beauty
vanishes at once. While I was surveying the prospect of this city,
which bears so little resemblance to any other that I have ever seen, a
reflection occurred to me that, if a man was suddenly to be removed from
Palmyra hither, and should take a view of no other city, in how
glorious a light would the ancient architecture appear to him! and what
desolation and destruction of arts and sciences would he conclude had
happened between the several eras of these cities!

I had now waited full three hours upon deck for the return of my man,
whom I had sent to bespeak a good dinner (a thing which had been long
unknown to me) on shore, and then to bring a Lisbon chaise with him to
the seashore; but it seems the impertinence of the providore was not yet
brought to a conclusion. At three o'clock, when I was from emptiness,
rather faint than hungry, my man returned, and told me there was a new
law lately made that no passenger should set his foot on shore without
a special order from the providore, and that he himself would have
been sent to prison for disobeying it, had he not been protected as the
servant of the captain. He informed me likewise that the captain had
been very industrious to get this order, but that it was then the
providore's hour of sleep, a time when no man, except the king himself,
durst disturb him.

To avoid prolixity, though in a part of my narrative which may be more
agreeable to my reader than it was to me, the providore, having at last
finished his nap, dispatched this absurd matter of form, and gave me
leave to come, or rather to be carried, on shore.

What it was that gave the first hint of this strange law is not easy
to guess. Possibly, in the infancy of their defection, and before their
government could be well established, they were willing to guard
against the bare possibility of surprise, of the success of which bare
possibility the Trojan horse will remain for ever on record, as a great
and memorable example. Now the Portuguese have no wal