In This, However, They Were Mistaken, For I
Gave Them Nothing, Telling Them They Might Seize My Baggage If They
Chose, But This They
[P.616] prudently declined to do.
Ten years ago I should hardly have
been able to extricate myself in this manner.
The valley of Feiran widens considerably where it is joined by the Wady
Aleyat, and is about a quarter of an hour in breadth. Upon the mountains
on both sides of the road stand the ruins of an ancient city. The houses
are small, but built entirely of stones, some of which are hewn and some
united with cement, but the greater part are piled up loosely. I counted
the ruins of about two hundred houses. There are no traces of any large
edifice on the north side; but on the southern mountain there is an
extensive building, the lower part of which is of stone, and the upper
part of earth. It is surrounded by private habitations, which are all in
complete ruins. At the foot of the southern mountain are the remains of
a small aqueduct. Upon several of the neighbouring hills are ruins of
towers, and as we proceeded down the valley for about three quarters of
an hour, I saw many small grottos in the rocks on both sides, hewn in
the rudest manner, and without any regularity or symmetry; the greater
part seemed to have been originally formed by nature, and afterwards
widened by human labour. Some of the largest which were near the ruined
city had, perhaps, once served as habitations, the others were evidently
sepulchres; but few of them were large enough to hold three corpses, and
they were not more than three or four feet high. I found no traces of
antiquity in any of them.
At half an hour from the last date-trees of Feiran, I saw, to the right
of the road, upon the side of the mountain, the ruins of a small town or
village, the valley in the front of which is at present quite barren. It
had been better built than the town above described, and contained one
very good building of hewn stone, with two stories, each having five
oblong windows in front. The roof
[p.617] has fallen in. The style of architecture of the whole strongly
resembles that seen in the ruins of St. Simon, to the north of Aleppo,
the mountains above which are also full of sepulchral grottos, like
those near Feiran. The roofs of the houses appear to have been entirely
of stone, like those in the ruined towns of the Haouran, but flat, and
not arched. There were here about a hundred ruined houses.
Feiran was formerly the seat of a Bishopric. Theodosius was bishop
during the Monothelite controversy. From documents of the fifteenth
century, still existing in the convent of Mount Sinai, there appears at
that time to have been an inhabited convent at Feiran. Makrizi, the
excellent historian, and describer of Egypt; who wrote about the same
time, gives the following account of Feiran, which he calls Faran.[The
present Bedouins call it Fyran or Feiran [Arabic], and thus it is spelt
wherever it occurs in the Arabic documents in the convent.
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