FOURTH ORDER LIGHT-HOUSE, AT PENFIELD REEF, L. I. SOUND.
For eighty years its hundred brazen feet towered superbly above port and town, and then it was partly destroyed by an earthquake. For nearly a thousand years the sacred image remained unmolested where it had fallen, by Greek and Roman, Pagan and Christian; but at last the Saracen owners of Rhodes, caring as little for its religious association as for its classic antiquity, sold the brass of it for the great sum of £36.000, to the Jewish merchants of Edessa.
Just about the time that the Colossus was set astride the Rhodian harbor, King Ptolemy Philadelphus caused a noble tower of superb white stone, four hundred feet high, to be erected by an architect named Sostrasius, son of Dixiphanes, at the entrance to the port of Alexandria, which was a bran-new busy city in those days, a mere mushroom growth in that old, old Egypt, where the upstart Ptolomies were reigning on the throne of the Pharaohs.
It is said that this Sostrasius didn’t want his own name to be forgotten, so he carved it deep in the stone of the tower and covered it over with plaster whereon he inscribed by royal command:
“King Ptolemy to the Gods, the Saviours, for the benefit of sailors.”
Josephus tells us that the light, kept burning on the top of this Pharos, as it was called, probably from a word that signifies fire, was visible for forty miles at sea. For a thousand years it shone constantly until the Alexandrian Wonder likewise fell a prey to time and the Saracens.
The words Pharos-Phâre, Faro, etc., have been adopted into more than one European language to express Light-house or sea-light.
Some persons suppose that great mirrors must have been used to direct the light on the Pharos and keep it from being lost, but it is most probable that no more effective means of illumination than a common fire was employed.
The only other Light-houses of antiquity of which any record has been preserved are the Tower of Conira in Spain, which Humboldt mentions as the Iron Tower, and a magnificent stone Light-house at Capio, near the mouth of the Guadalquiver, that Strabo tells us about, on a rock nearly surrounded by sea.