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PHAROS

Volume 17 · 267 words · 1810 Edition

or Phare, a light-house; a pile raised near a port, where fire is kept burning in the night, to guide and direct vessels near at hand. The pharos of Alexandria, built in the island of Pharos, at the mouth of the Nile, was anciently very famous, inasmuch as to communicate its name to all the rest. This most magnificent tower consisted of several stories and galleries, with a lantern at top, in which a light being continually burning, might be seen for many leagues at sea, and along the coast. It was accounted one of the seven wonders of the world. It was built by the famed architect Sostrates, a native of Cnidos, or, according to some, by Deiphanes, the father of Sostrates; and cost Ptolemy Philadelphus 800 talents. The several stories were adorned with columns, balustrades, galleries of the finest marble and workmanship; to which some add, that the architect had contrived to fasten some looking-glasses to artificially reflect the highest galleries, that one could see in them all the ships that sailed on the sea for a great way. Instead of which noble structure, one sees now only a kind of irregular castle, without ditches or outworks of any strength, the whole being accommodated to the inequality of the ground on which it stands, and which it seems is no higher than that which it should command. Out of the midst of this clumsy building rises a tower, which serves for a light-house, but which hath nothing of the beauty and grandeur of the old one. The Colossus of Rhodes also served as a pharos.