levels, each delved into the hill, and about each was set a wall, and
in each wall was a gate. But the gates were not set in a line: the
Great Gate in the City Wall was at the east point of the circuit, but
the next faced half south, and the third half north, and so to and fro
upwards; so that the paved way that climbed towards the Citadel turned
first this way and then that across the face of the hill. And each
time that it passed the line of the Great Gate it went through an
arched tunnel, piercing a vast pier of rock whose huge out-thrust bulk
divided in two all the circles of the City save the first. For partly
in the primeval shaping of the hill, partly by the mighty craft and
labour of old, there stood up from the rear of the wide court behind
the Gate a towering bastion of stone, its edge sharp as a ship-keel
facing east. Up it rose, even to the level of the topmost circle, and
there was crowned by a battlement; so that those in the Citadel might,
like mariners in a mountainous ship, look from its peak sheer down
upon the Gate seven hundred feet below. The entrance to the Citadel
also looked eastward, but was delved in the heart of the rock; thence
a long lamp-lit slope ran up to the seventh gate. Thus men reached at
last the High Court, and the Place of the Fountain before the feet of
the White Tower: tall and shapely, fifty fathoms from its base to the