Standing on the lantern, at the height of five hundred feet above the ground, a statue of Poseidon struck the pious note, and gave a Greek air to Africa seen from the sea. Other works of art are also reported: for example, a statue whose finger followed the diurnal course of the sun, a second statue who gave out with varying and melodious voices the various hours of the day, and a third who shouted an alarm as soon as a hostile flotilla set sail from any foreign port. This last must belong to an even more remarkable building, the Pharos of legend, which we will measure in a moment. The lighthouse was the key of the Alexandrian defences, and Cæsar occupied it before attacking the city. It was also the pivot of a signalling system that stretched along the coast. Fifteen miles to the west, on a ridge among masses of marigolds, the little watch-tower of Abousir is still standing, and it reproduces, in its three stories, the arrangements of Sostratus.
III
“I have taken a city,” wrote the Arab conqueror of Alexandria, “of which I can only say that it contains 4000 palaces, 4000 baths, 400 theatres, 12,000 greengrocers, and 40,000 Jews.” It contained a lighthouse, too, for the Pharos was still perfect and functioned for a few years more, lighting the retreating fleets of Europe with its beams. Then a slow dissolution began, and it shrinks, looms through the mists of legend, disappears. The first, and the irreparable, disaster was the fall of the lantern in the eighth century, carrying with it scientific apparatus that could not be replaced. Annoyed (say the Arabs) with the magic mirror that detected or scorched their ships, the Christians made a plot, and sent a messenger to Islam with news of a treasure in Syria. The treasure was found, whereupon the messenger reported something supreme—the whole wealth of Alexander and other Pharaohs which lay in the foundations of the lighthouse. Demolition began, and before the Alexandrians, who knew better, could intervene, the mirror had fallen and was smashed on the rocks beneath. Henceforward the Pharos is only a stump with a bonfire on the top. The Arabs made some restorations, but they were unsubstantial additions to the octagon, which the wind could blow away. Structural repairs were neglected, and in the twelfth century the second disaster occurred—the fall of the octagon through an earthquake. The square bottom story survived as a watch-tower. Two hundred years later it vanished in a final earthquake, and the very island where it had stood modified its shape and became a peninsula, joined to the mainland by a strip of sand.
Though unable to maintain the lighthouse on earth, the Arabs did much for it in the realms of fancy, increasing its height to seven hundred feet, and endowing it with various magical objects, of which the most remarkable was a glass crab. There really were crabs at Alexandria, but of copper, quite small, and standing under Cleopatra’s Needle; America possesses one to-day. Oriental imagination mixed two monuments into one, and caused a Moorish army to invade the Pharos and to ride through its three hundred rooms. The entrance gate vanished, and they could not find their way out, but ever descending the spirals came at last to the glass crab, slipped through a crack in its back and were drowned. Happier, though equally obscure, was the fate of another visitor, the poet El Deraoui. Who sings:
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.
On its height a dome enshadowed me, and there I saw my friends like stars.
I thought that the sea below me was a cloud, and that I had set up my tent in the midst of the heavens.
Only occasionally does the note of disillusionment and bitterness creep in. Jelaled Din ibn Mokram complains that:
The visitor to Alexandria receives nothing in the way of hospitality except some water and a description of Pompey’s Pillar.