" The Docks, which were completed a few years back, are equally magnificent. Until that period it was almost impossible to fit out ships of the line. This is now effected with great ease by means of the Docks, which consist of three basins one behind the other. Each basin is so spacious that two ships of the line can be received into it simultaneously. If a vessel has to undergo repairs, it is taken out of the harbour into the first basin, the water in which is on a level with that of the port, and the first basin is then closed towards the sea with water-tight gates. The ground of the other two basins is dry, as it is higher than the level of the haven. By means of a watercourse, situated rather higher up, of which I shall have occasion to speak presently, so much water is let into the lowest basin as to bring it on the same level with the second, which is also filling. As the water rises, the vessel naturally follows
DOCKS AT SEBASTOPOL, WITH RUINS OF FOET 195
its movements, and is soon above the surface of the harbour. It is now dragged into the second or middle basin, and a pair of gates again separates the lower basin from the central one. While the water in the lower basin is again allowed to flow back into the harbour, the central one is filled with so much water by means of the watercourse that it is on a level with the uppermost one, which is able to receive the vessel. This is again shut in by gates, and the water is let off. In this way the ship is dry-docked, without receiving the slightest injury, and can be easily repaired. The height of the Docks, where the ships are repaired, is forty feet above the level of the harbour. The space is so large, that three line-of-battle ships, two frigates, and other smaller vessels can be under the workmen's hand at once; for there are seven smaller graving docks, connected with the larger and first basin, which are filled directly from the watercourse. An idea of the expense of these works may be formed from the fact that the lock-gates, which were procured from England, alone cost the sum of two hundred and seventy thousand silver roubles.
The watercourse mentioned by Dr. Iioch is the canal to which reference has more than once been made in these pages, and which was so important a feature of the ground in the Battle of the Tchernaya. It draws its supply of water from that river, which at Tchergoun, where the canal commences, is 62 feet above the level of the great harbour, and follows the left bank of the Tchernaya as far as Inkermann, where it crosses the foot of the quarry ravine on a handsome aqueduct supported on eight arches and about 200 feet in length. It then pierces the cliff at Inkermann by a tunnel 900 feet long cut out of the limestone rock, and then keeps the shore of the great harbour as far as the Karabelnaya, passing the Careening Creek on an aqueduct of stone, similar to the one at Inkermann. A third aqueduct conveys the water across a hollow near this part of the town: and it then enters the Docks, which are 80 feet above the level of the bay. The fall of the canal, in the 12 miles which it traverses in its course, is thus 32 feet, or about one in 2,000.
It was this watercourse, and not, as was stated at the time, the supply of water to the town, which was cut off by the Allies, when they first sat down before the South Side.
The Docks were situated at the upper end of a short creek on the eastern side of the inner harbour, in which the " central ravine " terminates. These marvels of human ingenuity, perseverance, and adaptation, achieved by eleven years of incessant labour and by the most lavish expenditure of treasure, are now a heap of shattered and shapeless ruins. When their fate was decided on after the capture of the place, the French engineers charged themselves with the destruction of the portion nearest to the sea, while the English undertook a similar task in reference to the inner half: but so gigantic was the scale on which these works were constructed that the work of their demolition was only accomplished after weeks of the most laborious preparation. Had these
196 THE SEAT OP M'AR
constructions been destined for the assistance and development of commerce and the arts of peace, such a result, even if demanded by the stern necessities of war, could never have been contemplated by the intelligent communities of the West without a pang of regret, but the perfidious policy which applied all the resources of civilisation to a work exclusively intended to subserve an aggressive and unscrupulous barbarism, sanctioned by anticipation the unmingled triumph which hails its defeat.