[P.66]whether, if they chose to hide their money under ground, they
would be so imprudent as to inform strangers where it lay? The opinion,
however, is too strongly rooted in the minds of many of the country
people, to yield to argument; and this was the case with the Sheikh of
Medjel. Having asked me very rudely what business I had, I presented to
him the Pasha's Bouyourdi; but of twenty people present no one could
read it; and when I had read it to them, they refused to believe that it
was genuine. While coffee was roasting I left the room, finished copying
some inscriptions, and rode off in a torrent of rain. On the left side
of a vaulted gate-way leading into a room in which are three receptacles
for the dead is this inscription:
[Greek].
And opposite to it, on the right side of the gate-way, in large
characters,
[Greek]
Over the eastern church, or mosque gate,
[Greek]
KAFER EL LOEHHA.
[p.67]On the northern church gate,
[Greek].
On two stones built into the wall of a house on the side of the road,
beyond the village,
[Greek]
There are two other buildings in the town, which I suppose to have been
sepulchral.
