In The Summer They Exhibit Their Merchandize In The Open Air; But In The Winter They Make Use Of Some Large Rooms, Still Remaining Within The Khan.

The road to Banias leads along the valley, parallel with the course of the river; but as I had heard of some ruins in the mountain, at a village called Hereibe, to the east of the route, I turned in that direction, and reached the

HEREIBE.

[p.35] village in two hours after quitting Hasbeya. Between Souk el Khan and Hereibe lies the village Ferdous. Hereibe is considerably higher than the river. All this neighbourhood is planted with olive-trees; and olives, from hence to Damascus, are the most common food of the inhabitants, who put them into salt, but they do not thereby entirely remove the bitter taste. At Aleppo and Damascus, olives destined for the table are immersed for a fortnight in water, in which are dissolved one proportion of chalk and two proportions of alkali; this takes away all bitterness, but the fruit is at the same time deprived of a part of its flavour.

On the west side of the village of Hereibe stands a ruined temple, quite insulated; it is twenty paces in length, and thirteen in breadth; the entrance is towards the west, and it had a vestibule in front with two columns. On each side of the entrance are two niches one above the other, the upper one has small pilasters, the lower one is ornamented on the top by a shell, like the niches in the temple at Baalbec. The door- way, which has no decoration whatever, opens into a room ten paces square, in which no columns, sculpture, or Ornaments of any kind are visible; three of the walls only are standing. At the back of this chamber is a smaller, four paces and a half in breadth, by ten in length, in one corner of which is a half-ruined staircase, leading to the top of the building; in this smaller room are four pilasters in the four angles; under the large room are two spacious vaults. On the outside of the temple, at the east corners, are badly wrought pilasters of the Ionic order. The roof has fallen in, and fills up the interior. The stone employed is of the same quality as that used at Heusn Nieha and Baalbec.

From Hereibe I came to the spring Ain Ferkhan in one hour; and from thence, in three quarters of an hour, to the village

BANIAS.

[p.36]Rasheyat-el-Fukhar, over mountainous ground. The village stands on a mountain which commands a beautiful view of the lake Houle, its plain, and the interjacent country. It contains about one hundred houses, three-fourths of which are inhabited by Turks and the remainder by Greeks. The inhabitants live by the manufacture of earthen pots, which they sell to the distance of four or five days journey around, especially in the Haouran and Djolan; they mould them in very elegant shapes, and paint them with a red-earth:

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