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All of these, with the exception of the small one on the sea-face, were necessarily in absolute darkness, and in all were brackets for torches, similar to those in the principal chamber. Bertie counted them, and found that, including those first met with, they numbered one hundred and twenty-three. "How much do you think they weigh apiece?" he asked Harry when the tour was finished.
Towards the sea-face, Sebastopol was of immense strength, mounting seventeen guns at the Telegraph Battery, 104 at Fort Constantine, eighty at Fort Saint Michael, forty at battery No. 4, and some fifty others in smaller batteries. All these were on the north side of the harbor.
Although aware that the army intended, if possible, to embark, and that the French on entering might punish them for any aid given to it, they cheerfully aided the troops in removing the cannon from the sea-face and in strengthening the defences on the land side.
The banks of the two main branches of the Rhone are protected, as well as the sea-face of the Camargue, the triangle between them, and the annual cost to the country to keep them in repair is one hundred and twenty thousand francs. A flood, however, often breaks through the banks, and submerges a large district. On such occasions the additional expense is heavy.
To them, too, is to be attributed the old Roman bank, or 'vallum, along the sea-face of the marshlands, marked to this day by the names of Walsoken, Walton, and Walpoole. But the English invaders were incapable of following out, even of preserving, any public works.
We might then light upon a boat belonging to some fisherman. Of course all this is pure conjecture, and all we can arrange is that we shall keep our eyes about us, and look for an empty house in which we might hide and discover how we might leave the town on the land side, where it is not likely the fortifications will be nearly so strong as on the sea-face.”
It belongs to that rather melancholy group of old coast-towns, scattered along the great sea-face of New England, and of which the list is completed by the names of Portsmouth, Plymouth, New Bedford, Newburyport, Newport superannuated centres of the traffic with foreign lands, which have seen their trade carried away from them by the greater cities.
To grow a little catholic is the compensation of years; youth is one-eyed; and in those days, though I haunted the breakwater by day, and even loved the place for the sake of the sunshine, the thrilling seaside air, the wash of waves on the sea-face, the green glimmer of the divers' helmets far below, and the musical chinking of the masons, my one genuine pre-occupation lay elsewhere, and my only industry was in the hours when I was not on duty.
Whatever it may have been, it does not rise above the summit of the cliff, which goes down as straight as a wall for miles on the sea-face. The rift on the land side of the castle seems to have a width of about fifty feet, and I could see openings which were, I suppose, windows.
The plan in the Admiralty book of charts, among other inaccuracies, laid down the sea-face of the city as four miles long, instead of one; omitted the bay to the north-west of the lighthouse; represented the pier on which the strong fortifications are built as quite straight from the lighthouse in a southerly direction, whereas it forms a quarter of the compass, bending round to the south-west, or towards the city; and laid the distance between the piers at the entrance of the mole, a mile, instead of sixty, or sixty-five fathoms.
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