The Express.
London, England, 1855-10-08 00:00:00

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obstinctions and animation of every kind.

painted tablets, fixed on the corners of the.streets
tell the stranger that he is walking through the Rue
Napolkon, or Rue de la (Moire, or Place de la Qua-
rantaine,or some other equally well-baptized thorough.
fare which the enterprise of our allies has called into
existence within a very recent period. A busy
population, and crowds of arriving and departing
customers throng and jostle each other in the road-
ways, and, with the aid of strings of waggons and
light carts, interspersed with here and there a
mounted vivandiere, riding "not sideways but other-
ways," complete a very striking and peculiar picture
of life in one of its not least suggestive phases.

The high plateau behind the town is mainly own.
pied by government stores and pattered bits el
eneampment, some couple or three hundred yards
distant from which runs the line of field- works which
fortifies the position, in a sweeping curve from north
to south. In point of solidity and apparent permanency
these defences far surpass those by which Balakl•va
and its neighbourhood have been strengthened, their
construction having nothing whatever about it which
is improvieed or temporary in appearance. The
whole consists of the usual work of a continuous
line of ditch and substantial stone-faced earth bank,
crowned with batteries at intervals of every five
hundred yards, which are so constructed as to pour a
cross-fire upon any attacking force that might attempt
to force the line. Those of the redoubts which I
saw on Sunday had not received their guns; bat
this, I presume, will be dale before winter sets
in. The impression given to a glance at the whole,
was certainly such as in no way favoured the notion
that our allies meditate the early retreat from the
situation ; but rather encouraged the belief that,
peace or no peace, they'll hold &smite& for some
time to come.
From the point at which I emerged from this
admirable line of defence works, the route towards
the ruins lay down a steep and very stony
declivity, at the bottom of which was a
French encampment. Then an open space,
then a patch of encampment again, and so
on for nearly a mile, when the path entered a
broad grassy open, on the other side of which lay
all the crumbling ruins that have as yet escaped
removal. Spread over this were several Frenchmen,
impressed with the delusive notion that they were
" doing it" in the line of quail shooting ; but I
counted five shots out of six running in which the
sportsman missed his "feathers." They carried
cheap double Nitre% however, and were
girt on with game-bags—a completeness of
outfit which doubtless brought with it a keen
sense of sporting enjoyment, and so, minus the sup-
plementary game, realised its wearer's object well
enough. The first portion of the ruins! came to was
a thick and lofty wall, much frayed and honeycombed,
but still likely to resist the action of time for centu-
ries to come, if spared so long by the more destruc-
tive hand of man. Outside of this massive line
of masonry, and nearly washed by the sea, was a
collection of ruinous buildings also of evidently con-
siderable antiquity, but forming no part of
the ruins which give interest to the spot. Within,
nothing remains to point out where temple, or forum,
or market-place once stood; odd and scattered frag-
ments of foundation walls having alone outlived the
annihilating breath of some twenty centuries, and
escaped the yet more fatal agency of a vandalism
which can neither value nor respect what has bees
consecrated by time. The French had taken advert-
tage of one of these low masses of antique mum,
in the construction of the extreme outside battery el
their left attack, and here in incongruous fellowship
with gabions, ravines, and sand-bags, were to be
men the relies of buildings which had become reins
before ever Gaul had emerged from its anti-medieval
barbarism, or the savage peopled forests of Scandi-
navia echoed to the sound of the first civilising are.
Further on, in advance of this battery, the ruins pre-
sented very much the appearance of an exhausted
quarry, heaps of broken slabs and massive
chiselled blocks lying thickly all over the,
ground, and almost hiding the few traces
of foundations which the eye could still discover
amid the surrounding rubbish. After picking my
way cautiously, and not without danger to both
horse and rider, through these historic wrecks and
pitfalls, for a few hundred yard., I came upon the
remains of a few modern houses, in an open space,
before which were piled op fragments of old Oreek
pillars, capitals, and other productions of the architec-
tural chisel, cut out of a rough white marble, and but
little discoloured by time. The heap would have
filled some six or eight ordinary waggons. They
may probably have been in course of removal to Se-
bastopol at the time of the arrival of the Allies,
and the sadly fractured condition in which I found
them was no doubt largely owing to the round shot
and shell which had fallen and exploded on and
around the spot during the siege. A few perches be-
yond this was another French battery, like nearly all
the rest, dismantled and empty; and serving u •
sort of abutment to this was the lest fragment of the
Chersooese masonry, a portion of the wall of
what appeared, from the foundations, to
balm been • small circular tower. Windiog
Omagh the labyrinth of old trenches and ambuscades
which lay behind this, I reached the crown of the
little slope which divides the extreme end of Quaran-
tine Bay from the grassy and secluded valley from
the centre of which roes the green and gilt spire and
cupola of the "holy and ancient" church of St.
Wladimir. It was the sight of the sacrilegious
plundering of this building by the French, your
readers may perhaps remember, which Prince
Meatchikoff alleged to be the inciting cause of the
atrocities committed by the lismian gathers