there are batteries run up the steep sides of
the rocks as high as they can go; gathering
round the tall, raw, square-looking old castle
of Tarik, which French and Spanish shot in
the great old sulphurous-flaming sieges have
punched with holes till it is pock-marked all
over. With its flimsy-looking red and yellow
stucco, it stands, just as when Elliot stood
near it, or old Heathfield, amid the smoke, as
Reynolds grandly painted him, with the
fortress key clenched grimly in his hand. It is
now, Spanker tells me, giving it a look of
scorn, a prison for debt; and wonderful
stories are told of the strategic skill with which
several Gib officers contrive to keep out of it.

Everywhere in Gib the perpetual sense of
vigilance and defiance fills your mind: you
pass down Big Gun Alley, where a huge bombshell
of the old siege is let into the corner of
the street wall, and, lo, but a turn from Main
Street, with its cigar-shops, stores, chandlers,
clock-makers, and Moorish curiosities, you
are on the outer road, which is walled in
with batteries. The King's Bastion (this is
where you stand, faces the Spaniards of
Algesiras, grinning at them with its fang
teeth): how neat, clean, and firm is the stonework
that the convicts still chip and hammer
at, with its bomb-proof barracks, its terraces,
and slanting roofs for yawning guns! Yonder,
a little in the sea, is a low line of wall for
fresh batteries. This long jetty with guns is
the famous Devil's Tongue which Drinkwater
mentions. Line after line, all along the rock,
first the harbour, then the Ragged Staff, then
the bleak headland called Europa Point,
where the great attack was once made, are
everywhere mechanical-looking sentries, red
or blue, threatening and defiant to angry,
scowling-looking Spaniards, who talk of Gib
as a place only lent to us, and one day to be
given back with thanks. Everywhere pyramids
of black cannon balls, stacks of gun-
carriages, and rows on rows of dismounted
guns, mischievous and cumbrous; and wheels
in heaps like black cheeses. Everywhere
Death's playthings laid up in ordinary. The
civilian in Gib seems a mere tolerated
accident, and the young military "blood"
delights to tell you that, in case of revolt or
war, the Government, to whom nearly all the
houses and shops belong, would sweep them
away at one swoop and plant fresh batteries
upon their sites.

But with all this parade of war, I have not
yet mentioned the great rock galleries that
honeycomb the rock, particularly on the
north side facing the Neutral Ground, which
looks towards Saint Roque. Look up at the
great hull of grey rock, scarped and
unscalable, with the dark square spots in
irregular lines around the middle of the crag.
Those are the galleries. That end one, with
eyelet holes facing east and west, is Saint
George's Hall. They have vomited fire and
death before now, and are always watching
the Spanish lines. On this side is the Water
Gate, with its herd of latteen-shaped boats,
with their yards sloping back like greyhound's
ears; its guards and gates. Outside,
is a broad, sandy track, called Campo,
where the white tents of a regiment under
canvas gleam in a sun almost African in
violence.

This heat is not always so extreme. It is
the levanter, or east wind, the dreaded
sirocco of the rock, now blowing; the tyrant
of Gib, as the west wind is the liberator; the
noxious fire-blast that spoils old generals'
tempers and produces extra parades; that
tosses all the great ships to and fro between
Cabrita and Europa Point, and strews the
shore with broken nut-shells of stranded
barks. This is the dry, hot wind that makes
the mosquitoes more shrill of song and more
poisonous; that drives old General Martinet
to break Spanker, and Spanker to call out
Driver, merely because he set his Skye
terrier on his (Spanker's) pet Barbary ape,
which is chained to a pillar on the wall
outside the bomb-proof officers' rooms in the
King's Bastion. This is the wind that brings
flocks of scarlet-coated subs to the golden
grapes at the King's Arms to drain, thirstily,
sangaree, shandy-gaff, claret cup, and endless
foaming tubes of Bass's bitter. This is the
wind that blights and shrivels, and gives you
a sense of unhealthy strained breathing, and
of checked perspiration that stirs your bile
and inflames your liver. It brings on court
martials, cashierings, rows, insubordination,
quarrels at mess, and is liked only by the
apes that steal the figs in the high rock
gardens.

I am just fresh from Algesiras. That
sleepy Spanish town across the blue bay
from whence Gibraltar looks at night to
be a huge couchant sphynx, wearing a
brilliant necklace of lamps; or like a huge
ark, not yet finished, those lights being the
twinkle of the thousand shipwrights' candles.
I am fresh from the inn of Ximenes, facing
the landing-place, where I sit all day and
watch the ferry boats start and come in or
the cows swimming off to be embarked in
the Xebec, for the Spanish garrison at
Ceuta, on the Morocco coast. My door has
been beset with sleeping sailors, custom-
house officers, and stray soldiers, who ignore
England, and look at the great floating man-
of-war with contempt or hatred. I came
across in a one-sailed passage boat, with a
crew of old women, who cross to smuggle
English handkerchiefs and stockings. It is
only five miles across from this faded town,
that some of Edward the Third's chivalry
helped Alonzo to win from the Moors; but we
take I don't know how many hours doing it.
Crescenting the bay, tacking, luffing, diving
in with the speed and keenness of an arrow,
missing the harbour and then tacking out
again, again to miss our mark. At last we
are in, under the low mischievous lines of