Standing on the lantern was a statue of Poseidon. This terminated the tower, whose complete height certainly exceeded 400 feet and possibly touched 500.
(2) History of the Building.
We must now follow this masterpiece of engineering into ages of myth and oblivion. It retained its form and functions unimpaired up to the Arab Conquest (A.D. 641). The first, and irreparable, disaster was the fall of the lantern (about 700), entailing the loss of scientific apparatus that could not be replaced. There is a legend that the disaster was planned by the Byzantine Emperor, who could not attack Egypt owing to the magic “Mirror,” which detected or destroyed his ships. He sent an agent who gained the Caliph’s confidence and told him that beneath the Pharos the treasure of Alexander the Great lay buried. The Caliph commenced demolition, and before the inhabitants of Alexandria, who knew better, could intervene, the two upper stories had fallen into the sea. Henceforth the Pharos is only a stump with a bonfire on the top.
There were restorations under Ibn Touloun (880), and also about 980, but they were unsubstantial additions to the Octagon which the wind could blow away. Structural repairs were neglected, and about 1100 the second disaster occurred—the fall of the Octagon itself through an earthquake. The square bottom story survived, but only as a watchtower on the top of which was run up a small square Mosque. (see [Plan I, Fig. ii], which illustrates this state of the Pharos. The level of the ground has risen owing to the debris from the octagon, and the lower story has been buttressed). Then came the final earthquake (14th cent.) and the slow dissolution was over.
Though unable to preserve the Pharos the Arabs admired it, and speak, with their love of the marvellous, of a statue on it whose finger followed the diurnal course of the sun, of a second statue who gave out with varying and melodious voices the various hours of the day, and of a third who shouted an alarm as soon as a hostile flotilla set sail,. The first two statues may have existed; the Alexandrians loved such toys. And there is an element of truth in another Arab legend—that the building rested upon a “glass crab.” Some vitrious composition probably did form the foundation, and we know that “Cleopatra’s Needle” actually did rest on crabs of metal (p. [162]); the oriental mind has confused the two monuments. The legend culminates in the visit to the Pharos of a cavalcade of horsemen who lose their way in the 300 rooms, and inadvertently riding into a crack in the glass crab’s back fall into the sea! But sometimes the lighthouse sheltered pleasanter adventures. The poet El Deraoui, for example, writes:
A lofty platform guides the voyager by night, guides
him with its light when the darkness of evening falls.
Thither have I borne a garment of perfect pleasure
among my friends, a garment adorned with the memory of
beloved companions.