aars, the kiosks of
the city? Beyond the city, where Cocytus, rippling down from the
wooded mountain, forms, with the lake into which it flows, a
peninsula, there, on an isthmus, stands the strong fortress of Ali
Pasha, with vast, massive bastions, a heavy, iron-plated drawbridge,
and a ditch in front of the walls full of solid sharp-pointed stakes
in two fathoms of water. From the summits of the ramparts the throats
of a hundred cannons gape down upon the town--iron dogs, whose barking
can be heard four miles off. On the walls an innumerable multitude of
armed men keep watch, and in front of the gate the guns look out upon
each other from the port-holes of the steep bastions on both sides of
it. Woe to those who should attempt to make their way into the citadel
by force! The gate, fastened with a huge chain, is defended by three
heavy iron gratings, and from close beneath the lofty projecting roof
circular pieces of artillery shine forth, in front of which are
pyramidal stacks of bombs.

The court-yard forms a huge crescent, in which nothing is visible but
instruments of warfare, engines of destruction. In the lower part of
the semicircular barracks stand the sentry-boxes, while in the
opposite semicircle a long pavilion cuts the fortress in two,
extending from the end of one semicircle to the end of the other, and
here are three gates, which lead into the heart of the fortress.

In all this long building there are no windows above the court-yard,
only two rows of narrow embrasures are visible therein. All the
windows are on the other side overlooking the garden, and there dwell
the odalisks of Ali Pasha's three sons. The three sons, Omar, Almuhan,
and Zaid, inhabit the building with the three gates. The back of this
building looks out upon the garden, in which the harems of the pasha's
sons are wont to disport themselves.

Here again a long bastion barricades the garden, a bastion also
protected by trenches full of water, across whose iron bridge you gain
admission into the pasha's inmost fortress.

And what is that like? Nobody can tell. The brass gates, covered with
silver arabesques, seem to be eternally closed, and none ever comes in
or goes out save Ali and his dumb eunuchs, and those captives whose
heads alone are sent back again. The bastion surrounding this central
fortress is so high that you cannot look into it from the top of the
citadel outside; but if any one could peep down upon it from the
summit o