the total destruction of his power. He, however, braved all the
difficulty and dangers, and recklessly persisted in the course he had
taken, under the influence of the infatuation in which his attachment to
Cleopatra held him, as by a spell.

[Sidenote: The Pharos.]
[Sidenote: Great splendor of the Pharos.]

The war in which Caesar was thus involved by his efforts to give
Cleopatra a seat with her brother on the Egyptian throne, is called in
history the Alexandrine war. It was marked by many strange and romantic
incidents. There was a light-house, called the Pharos, on a small island
opposite the harbor of Alexandria, and it was so famed, both on account
of the great magnificence of the edifice itself, and also on account of
its position at the entrance to the greatest commercial port in the
world, that it has given its name, as a generic appellation, to all
other structures of the kind--any light-house being now called a Pharos,
just as any serious difficulty is called a Gordian knot. The Pharos was
a lofty tower--the accounts say that it was five hundred feet in height,
which would be an enormous elevation for such a structure--and in a
lantern at the top a brilliant light was kept constantly burning, which
could be seen over the water for a hundred miles. The tower was built in
several successive stories, each being ornamented with balustrades,
galleries, and columns, so that the splendor of the architecture by day
rivaled the brilliancy of the radiation which beamed from the summit by
night. Far and wide over the stormy waters of the Mediterranean this
meteor glowed, inviting and guiding the mariners in; and both its
welcome and its guidance were doubly prized in those ancient days, when
there was neither compass nor sextant on which they could rely. In the
course of the contest with the Egyptians, Caesar took possession of the