In a little while the carriage and guide were ready, and we started. The guide was a Greek--he may have been a Greek brigand--who had not been long in Sevastopol, and didn’t know enough about the place to hurt himself to any alarming extent. He spoke English fairly, but not over elegantly, and was, on the whole, satisfactory.
We drove off along the street leading upward from the hotel, and in the direction of the Malakoff and other fortresses of the days of the war. We were soon on the edge of the bluff overlooking the southern harbor, and could gaze down almost perpendicularly on the ships at anchor there. As we looked toward the end of the harbor, we discovered just beyond it a new building, and I asked what it was.
“That is the railway station,” was the guide’s reply. “The government is building a railway from Sevastopol to connect with the line from the Sea of Azof to Moscow and St. Petersburg. They have surveyed all the line, and a good deal of it is finished. They are going to lay the track all round this harbor, so that ships can be loaded right from the trains and the trains from the ships.”
I looked and saw the grading ready for the rails on both sides of the harbor and sweeping round the hill-side toward Inkermann.
Had this railway existed twenty years ago the allies would have failed to capture Sevastopol. It was their primitive mode of transportation more than anything else that caused Russia’s defeat. She learned then the importance of railways, and has since been putting her knowledge into practice.
We climbed to the top of the Malakoff, where a single Russian soldier holds peaceful possession of what thousands were once unable to defend. From the summit of the casemate we looked over the field, traced the lines of the contending armies, and then turned toward Inkermann and the defenses in that direction. The ground all round is cut and torn with rifle-pits, { 099}trenches, approaches, and defenses, and is a picture of desolation. Sevastopol is a mass of ruins; its inhabited dwellings are not a tenth the number of the fallen or falling walls, and you can ride or walk through whole squares of what were once rows of handsome edifices, but are now nothing but heaps of stones. It is more like Pompeii than any modern city I have ever seen.