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 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: