Had fire been rained down from Heaven upon the devoted city its annihilation could not have been more complete. The shells of princely mansions which remained on the French side of the town had been knocked to atoms by the Russian batteries on the north side; the theatre was demolished, and the beautiful church of St. Peter and St. Paul laid in ruins by the same implacable foe; and they directed particular volleys of round shot and shell on a monument to one of their naval heroes, which stood conspicuously placed in front of a beautiful little kiosk in the midst of a garden, to which there was a fine approach from the place behind Fort Nicholas by a handsome flight of steps, now destroyed. On a quadrilateral pedestal of some pretensions, supporting entablatures with allegorical devices, and ornamented at the summit by a puppis, were inscribed, when first I saw it, the name of "Kazarski," and the dates 1829 and 1834, with an intimation that the monument was erected in his honour. Most of the letters were stolen and knocked away; and had not the fire from the north ceased, the pedestal itself would have disappeared likewise. The French garrison, somewhat harassed by the incessant fire on the town, which, however, did them or us but little mischief, constructed out of the débris of the houses a very neat quartier inside the walls. The huts of which it was composed consisted of wood, ranged in regular rows, with the usual street nomenclature in these parts of the world. The stranger who halted to survey it from the neighbouring heights, deceived by the whitewashed and plastered walls of the houses, might think that Sebastopol was still a city; but when he walked through its grass-grown, deserted streets, formed by endless rows of walls alone, of roofless shells of houses, in which not one morsel of timber could be seen, from threshold to eaves; when he beheld great yawning craters, half filled with mounds of cut stone, heaped together in irregular masses; when he gazed on tumuli of disintegrated masonry, once formidable forts, and shaken, as it were, into dust and powder; when he stumbled over the fragments of imperial edifices, to peer down into the great gulfs, choked up with rubbish, which marked the site of the grand docks of the Queen of the Euxine; beheld the rotting masts and hulls of the sunken navy which had been nurtured there; when he observed that what the wrath of the enemy spared was fast crumbling away beneath the fire of its friends, and that the churches where they worshipped, the theatres, the public monuments, had been specially selected for the practice of the Russian gunners, as though they were emulous of running a race in destruction with the allied armies — he would, no doubt, come to the conclusion that the history of the world afforded no such authentic instance of the annihilation of a great city. It is certainly hard to believe that the site can ever be made available for the erection of houses or the construction of docks; but I am by no means certain that the immense resources in the command of manual labour possessed by the Government of Russia, of which this very struggle afforded us all such striking proofs, in the Quarantine Battery, the Bastion Centrale, the Bastion du Mât, the{464} Redan, the Mamelon, and the Malakoff, may not be made available in time to clear away these modern ruins, and to rebuild houses, theatres, palaces, churches, forts, arsenals, and docks, as before.
In the Inkerman ravines are inexhaustible supplies of building material, which can be floated by the Tchernaya into the waters of the harbour with very little trouble. The immense quantity of cut stone lying in piles at the upper end of the harbour showed that the Allies interrupted the Russians in the development of the splendid architectural plans which it was the ambition of emperors to accomplish, and which engaged every thought and energy of the Muscovite governors of the Crimea.