124 THE TUNGUR-FUR OF DAR FURNUNG [app.

Beyond the gorge, to the east, where a few square miles of hillside shelve less steeply, the ground is all ribbed with ancient cultivation

'' terrasses." Now all is overgrown with stunted kiir bush and the lines of the stones have been broken by the rains, but at one time all must have been cleared and every foot of ground levelled into successive ledges, each

a foot or so above the other.

The main entrance to the fort is from the west, that is, from the side of the settlement, and the great gateway, three and a half yards broad, is flanked by stone walls not less than 12 feet high. Entering here the outer

line of the defences one mounts along the broad sloping pathway between the outer and the inner walls to the fort which crowns the peak.

The foundations of the fort, like the outer and inner defensive Hues beyond it, are well built of rough unhewn boulders, but the upper stories of the structure, and the inner rooms and dividing walls, are of magnificent red brick, hard as iron, metallic in ring and slightly glazed. The labour involved in bringing the hundreds of thousands of bricks required from the

kilns, which lie a mile or more away to the south, must have been enormous,

for the intervening ground is inconceivably rough, cut and scarred by ravines and littered deep in jagged rocks. The actual plan of the fort is

like nothing but a rabbit warren: galleries run in and out and chamber

leads to chamber in bewildering manner. All is partly ruined, but the

outlines can easily be traced. Near the centre is a deep square pit, with lower sides and bottom of rock, and upper sides of brick. Higher up, in

fact at the topmost point of all, one enters a small brick room, perhaps a guardroom, and from it descends spirally down steps through a series of doorways, each at right angles to and below the last one, to what appears

to be a dungeon in the rocky foundations of the fort. The steps are made of huge burnt bricks 2J spans long by ij broad^. The doorways have

lintels of wood, long since decayed and crumbling, and small windows open at intervals to the outer air. The entrance to the dungeon itself, if such it be, is just large enough to admit a man, and beyond is the horrible

cavity itself, too low for a man to stand in and with a floor space of not more than three square yards. Some 50 yards to the north of the fort and about 20 feet below it stands the Sultan's (.'') house, a medium-sized oblong building of red brick. The only remarkable feature of it was the ingenious manner in which the inside surface of the walls had been

plastered with red earth of the exact kind used for making the bricks and then subjected to intense heat by the lighting of enormous fires inside the room, so that the plaster itself had become hard brick.

Below the fort and the Sultan's house, about 200 yards to the south-

west, stands the mosque, a square building of thick walls, with mihrdb

to the east and four interior pillars. To the casual eye there was nothing

to distinguish the architecture from that of the red brick and stone mosques

^ These larj^e bricks are also found here and there in the ruins of the larger houses and the fort and mosque—they have also been noticed near F6ga in western Kordofan on Gebel Zankur, a site lying on the ancient highroad from Nubia to Darfur—but the vast majority of the bricks used in all the buildings were of the usual size and shape.