142 HISTORY OF AURANGZIB. [CHAP. VII. things of the kind he had seen. On firing a revolver at 10 yards, the bullet was merely lodged in the face of the wall and could be picked out with the nail. Such walls, according to him, might have stood modern battering guns for a length of time, and in fact some of the British artillerymen doubted if any impression to speak of could have been made on them.* Beyond the triple walls, on the side of the plain was a wide and deep ditch, supplied with water from the canals of the Arghandab river. On the north face of the ridge against which the fort nestled, there are forty steps cut in the rock and leading up to a cave half way up the hill. On the two sides of the entrance, are two couchant leopards, and the cave itself contains a bow-shaped chamber with a domed roof.† Two guard-towers had been built during the Mughal occupation on adjacent projections of the rock to oppose an enemy's assault by this path, because from the top of the Forty Steps guns could command both the citadel and the city. The fort of Lakah crowned a peak in the middle of the ridge and defended Qandahar on its western flank, where the hill descended to the plain in a steep The gates.
- Le Messurier, 130 and 131.
+ Bellew, 232 and 233. Digitized by Microsoft Ⓡ
