Page:Troja by Heinrich Schliemann.djvu/140

blocks of hard limestone (marked d d), one of which (a) may still be seen in situ on the ancient fortification-wall c. Consequently all the edifices of the Acropolis of the second city had the same kind of architecture; but for the most part they had also the same mode of construction, the foundations consisting of calcareous stones cemented with clay, the upper walls of bricks, with terraced roofs of wooden beams, rushes, and clay. In many halls of these edifices we see well-formed floors, consisting either of small pebbles, or of clay intermixed with very small pebbles, or merely of beaten clay: in the last case the floors have nearly always been vitrified in the great fire. We found only one floor of clay covered with plates of green slate. How total and complete was the catastrophe in which the second city perished, is seen from the fact that most of its edifices have been destroyed to their very foundations, as well as from the tremendous masses of vitrified brick-débris and calcined wooden beams, which we found especially in the larger edifices and in the gates. In places where the great quantity of wood gave an abundant aliment to the fire, as for instance the parastades and the doors, large parts of the brick walls have been completely melted and transformed into a kind of spongy glass-metal. As I have mentioned in Ilios (p. 313), for a long distance on the north side the floors resembled a sort of vitrified sheet, which was only interrupted by the house-walls.

I found in the débris of the second city very large masses of green slates, which must once have served for paving the house floors, and perhaps also the streets between the houses; but strange to say, the above-mentioned floor, in the great edifice r x in the western part of the citadel, is the only one which is still covered with them, and it was only in a chamber of the edifice C that I found a few of them still in situ. The plates of slate were found almost exclusively in small pieces, owing to the intense incandescence which must have prevailed in the catastrophe of the second