The Rulers of the Mediterranean. Richard Harding Davis
a half-mile above them so that it will strike an object many miles off at sea. It will be a very strange sensation to the captain of such a vessel when he finds her bombarded by shells that belch forth from a drifting cloud.
No stranger has really any idea of the real strength of this fortress, or in what part of it its real strength lies. Not one out of ten of its officers knows it. Gibraltar is a grand and grim practical joke; it is an armed foe like the army in Macbeth, who came in the semblance of a wood, or like the wooden horse of Troy that held the pick of the enemy's fighting-men. What looks like a solid face of rock is a hanging curtain that masks a battery; the blue waters of the bay are treacherous with torpedoes; and every little smiling village of Spain has been marked down for destruction, and has had its measurements taken as accurately as though the English batteries had been playing on it already for many years. The Rock is undermined and tunnelled throughout, and food and provisions are stored away in it to last a siege of seven years. Telephones and telegraphs, signal stations for flagging, search-lights, and other such devilish inventions, have been planted on every point, and only the Governor himself knows what other modern improvements have been introduced into the bowels of this mountain or distributed behind bits of landscape gardening on its surface.
On the 25th of February, at half-past ten in the morning, three guns were fired in rapid succession from the top of the Rock, and the windows shook. Three guns mean that Gibraltar is about to be attacked by a fleet of war-ships, and that "England expects every man to do his duty." So I went out to see him do it. Men were running through the streets trailing their guns, and officers were galloping about pulling at their gloves, and bodies of troops were swinging along at a double-quick, which always makes them look as though they were walking in tight boots, and bugles were calling, and groups of men, black and clearly cut against the sky, were excitedly switching the air with flags from every jutting rock and every rampart of the garrison.
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