Page:The Seven Cities of Delhi.djvu/57

 a deep pond, opposite the Sarai piquet. The Mori Bastion also, shattered by constant fire, appears at closer ran^e, as the road passes the "Sammy-house." Bastions, it may be explained, are four-sided works, built out in advance of the main walls, and designed both to fire to the front and to sweep the faces of the "curtains," the technical word for the connecting walls. Where the distance between two bastions was too great for grape-shot to be effective, Martello towers, mounting a single gun, and loopholed at the ground level for musketry, were introduced. These towers were entered by draw-bridges, so that, in the event of a riot in the city, they might be utilized as forts. The bastions and towers were constructed by British engineers, in order to improve the defensible condition of Shah Jahan's walls, and it was the irony of fate that they were first used against ourselves.

A small red sandstone embrasure in the police lines marks the site of the right half of No. I. Battery, designed to fire on the Mori Bastion. The left half was near a well, visible from the road, in the garden of the house, which is next to the Court of the Sessions Judge. This battery, for a time, fired on the Cashmere Gate, now hidden by trees, but the guns were afterwards removed to the great breaching battery. A