Made of three hexagonal sections, each smaller in girth than the one below, and covered in white marble, the lighthouse stood three hundred feet tall and was a wonder of the world. On its top there burned a perpetual fire reflected far out to sea in all directions by an ingenious arrangement of highly polished marble slabs, though during daylight the fire was almost invisible. Caesar had read all about it, knew that it was those selfsame marble slabs shielded the flames from the winds, but he burned to ascend the six hundred stairs and look. "It is a good day to enter the Great Harbor," said his pilot, a Greek mariner who had been to Alexandria many times. "We will have no trouble seeing the channel markers anchored pieces of cork painted red on the left and yellow on the right." Caesar knew all that too, though he tilted his head to gaze at the pilot courteously and listened as if he knew nothing. "There are three channels Steganos, Poseideos and Tauros, from left to right as you come in from the sea. Steganos is named after the Hog's Back Rocks, which lie off the end of Cape Lochias where the palaces are Poseideos is so named because it looks directly at Poseidon's temple and Tauros is named after the Bull's Horn Rock which lies off Pharos Isle. In a storm luckily they are rare hereabouts it is impossible to enter either harbor. We foreign pilots avoid the Eunostus Harbor drifting sandbanks and shoals everywhere. As you can see," he chattered on, waving his hand about, "the reefs and rocks abound for miles outside. The lighthouse is a boon for foreign ships, and they say it cost eight hundred gold talents to build." Caesar was using his legionaries to row: it was good exercise and kept the men from growing sour and quarrelsome. No Roman soldier liked being separated from terra firma, and most would spend an entire voyage managing not to look over the ship's side into the water. Who knew what lurked thereunder? The pilot decided that all of Caesar's ships would use the Poseideos passage, as today it was the calmest of the three.