Over the Mosque are vaulted rooms. From the summit of the mass is a _View_ of Alexandria, not beautiful but instructive. From right to left are:—Fort Adda, Ras-el-Tin lighthouse (background); minarets of Abou el Abbas and Bouseiri Mosques (foreground); Kom-el-Nadur Fort; Terbana Mosque (foreground); Pompey’s Pillar (back); Kom-el-Dik Fort; the long line of Eastern suburbs; beyond them the distant minaret of Sidi Bishr; the coast ends in the wooded promontory of Montazah. Close beneath is the modern Breakwater stretching towards the opposing promontory of Silsileh; and left, awash with waves, the Diamond Rock.—And now let the visitor (if the effort is not beyond him) elevate himself 400 feet higher into the air. Let him replace the Ras-el-Tin lighthouse by a Temple to Poseidon; let him delete the mosques and the ground they stand on, and imagine in their place an expanse of water crossed by a Dyke; let him add to “Pompey’s Pillar” the Temple of Serapis and Isis and the vast buttressed walls of the Library; let him turn Kom-el-Dik into a gorgeous and fantastic park, with the Tomb of Alexander at its feet; and the Eastern Suburbs into gardens; and finally let him suppose that it is not Silsileh that stretches towards him but the peak of the Ptolemaic Palace, sheltering to its right the ships of the royal fleet and flanked on the landward side by the tiers of the theatre and the groves of the Mouseion.—Then he may have some conception of what Ancient Alexandria looked like from the summit of the Pharos—what she looked like when the Arabs entered in the autumn of 641.
Beneath the Batteries on the north of the Fort, and almost level with the beach, is a long gallery in which lie some shells that were fired by the English in 1882.
The tram now follows the curve of the _Eastern Harbour_, a beautifully shaped basin. It was the main harbour of the ancients, but Mohammed Ali when he planned the modern city, developed the Western instead (p. 91). There is a sea wall in two stages, to break the waves which dash right on to the road in rough weather; and there is a very fine promenade—the New Quays—which stretches all the way from Kait Bey to Silsileh. A walk along it can be delightful, though occasionally marred by bad smells.—We pass, right, the Bouseiri Mosque (_see_ above) and finally come to the French Gardens, that connect with the Square, whence we started.