rcher could place himself in safety, in an
angle of the stonework, so soon as he had shot his arrow. The interior
wall was also crested with battlements. The curvilinear rampart did not
present projecting angles, the salients of which, Vitruvius tells us,
could not resist the repeated blows of the siege machinery of those
days. It was intersected by nine towers, of three vaulted stories each,
at unequal distances, accordingly as the nature of the ground demanded
greater or less means of defence, was pierced with loopholes and was not
very solid. Vitruvius would have had them rounded and of cut stone;
those of Pompeii are of quarried stone, and in small rough ashlars,
stuck together with mortar. The third story of each tower reached to the
platform of the rampart, with which it communicated by two doors.

Notwithstanding all that remains of them, the walls of Pompeii were no
longer of service at the time of the eruption. Demolished by Sylla and
then by Augustus, shattered by the earthquake, and interrupted as I have
said, they left the city open. They must have served for a public
promenade, like the bastions of Geneva.

Eight gates opened around the city (perhaps there was a ninth that has
now disappeared, opening out upon the sea). The most singular of all of
them is the Nola gate, the construction of which appears to be very
ancient. We there come across those fine cut stones that reveal the
handiwork of primitive times. A head considerably broken and defaced,
surmounting the arcade, was accompanied with an Oscan inscription,
which, having been badly read by a savant, led for an instant to the
belief that the Campanians of the sixth century before Jesus Christ
worshipped the Egyptian Isis. The learned interpreter had read: _Isis
propheta_ (I translate it into Latin, supposing you to know as little as
I do of the Oscan tongue). The inscription really ran, _idem probavit_.

[Illustration: The Nola Gate at Pompeii.]

It is worth while passing through the gate to get a look at the angle
formed by the ramparts at this one point. I doubt whether the city was
ever attacked on that side. Before reaching the gate the assailants
would have had to wind along through a narrow gallery, where the
archers, posted on the walls and armed with arrows and stones, would
have crushed them all.

The Herculaneum gate is less ancient, and yet more devastated by time
than the former one. The arcade has fallen in, and it requires some
att