OR RUIN OF AKARKOUFF. 
277 
the center of this tract, we found it standing upon a gently 
gradual elevation, ascending from the perfect level upwards of 
sixty yards. * This apparently foundation hill, though in fact only 
a collection of rubbish round the pile itself, consists of loose 
sandy earth, intermixed with fragments of burnt brick, pottery, 
and a kind of hard clay partially vitrified. I measured one of 
the baked bricks that was nearly entire ; it formed a square of 
twelve inches, in thickness two and three quarters, and was of 
an excessively hard substance. No characters whatever were 
traceable on this specimen, nor oil any of the fragments we saw. 
From the gentle elevation just described, rises an enormous 
solidly-built mass, crowning it like a rock, and composed entirely 
of sun-dried brick. Its present irregular shape, worn away by 
time, and furrowed by the rain of ages, leaves no possibility of 
doing more than conjecturing its original form. Its sides face 
the cardinal points, and their present appearances are shown in 
the four accompanying drawings. Neither mounds nor any 
rubbish of ancient decay, track its more distant vicinity in any 
direction except to the east, where, not many paces from the 
foot of the Tepesse, a couple of extensive and high heaps of 
ruins, composed of the same materials with those of their more 
gigantic neighbour, vary the perfect flat of the plain. The height 
of the Tepesse, from the summit of the gradual slope, from which 
the more ponderous fab rick shoots upwards, to the towering irre¬ 
gular top of the whole, may be about a hundred and twenty-live, 
or thirty feet; and its circumference at the bottom of this upper 
structure, is three hundred feet; which huge pile, at about ten 
feet in a perpendicular line from its base, measures a hundred 
feet in the breadth of its face. From its foundation, and the 
* See Plate LXVIII. a. b. c. d. 
