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One of the most substantial and elaborate residences of that day, it is two and a half stories in height and built of heavy masonry, the front illustrating well the pleasing use of surfaced Germantown stone, flush pointed, the other walls being of rubble masonry, plastered and marked off to simulate dressed stone.
The little stones were yet rattling around us, and the ashes still drizzling, as the stalwart youth hurried forth with me across the hot glowing rubble. We soon stood on the brink of the vast chasm, the smoke of which, altho a gentle air was bearing it away from us, unfortunately veiled the interior of the crater, which smoked all round from a thousand crannies.
The other well lies about half a mile to the westward of the former: it is also dug in the limestone rock. A few yards to the north-east of the building is the Furzeh or custom-house, whose pristine simplicity tempts me to describe it: a square of ground surrounded by a dwarf rubble enclosure, and provided with a proportional mosque, a tabular block of coralline niched in the direction of Meccah.
Long slough grass grew there, and blue waxen flowers struggled up amid the rubble of what were once defiant bastions. I lay down in the luxuriant grass, closed my eyes, and longed for a vision of heroic days.
Better face the worst and be done with it. 'Come on, I said, grimly. Heavily loaded, we stumbled over railway lines and rubble heaps, and came on the harbour. Davies led the way to a stairway, whose weedy steps disappeared below in gloom. 'If you'll get into the dinghy, he said, all briskness now, 'I'll pass the things down.
Trains of ammunition trucks, supply carts and wagons of all sorts, great trucks laden with jam and meat and flour, all were passing every moment. There was an incessant din of horses' feet and the steady crunch crunch of heavy boots as the soldiers marched through the rubble and the brickdust. And I knew that all this had gone on while the town was still under fire.
The western cemetery of Sikyatki is situated among the hillocks covered with surface rubble below a house occupied in summer by a Hopi and his family. From the nature of the soil the excavation of this cemetery was very difficult, although the mortuary objects were more numerous.
It is all beautiful, calm and harmonious; and if one is tempted to mourn the absence of life and local colour, one has only to visit an abandoned Medersa to see that, but for French intervention, the charming colonnades and cedar chambers of the college of the Oudayas would by this time be a heap of undistinguished rubbish for plaster and rubble do not "die in beauty" like the firm stones of Rome.
In the morning the chalky rubble brought from the pits upon the Downs and used for mending gateways leading into the fields glistens brightly. Upon the surface of each piece of rubble there adheres a thin coating of ice: if this be lightly struck it falls off, and with it a flake of the chalk.
There they stood, long walls of rubble and plaster, breeched; ends of farm buildings gone; and many only a heap of rubbish. The surprising thing to me was to see here a house destroyed, and, almost beside it, one not even touched. That seemed to prove that the struggle here was not a long one, and that a comparatively small number of shells had reached it.
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