Adjoining To The Tomb Is A Hole In The Rocky
Ground, Over Which An Apartment Has Been Built For The
Reception of
maniacs; they are put down into the hole, and a stone is placed over its
mouth; here they
Remain for three or four days, after which, as the
Turks pretend, they regain their senses. The Christians say that the
Santon was a Patriarch of Damascus, who left his flock, and turned
hermit, and that he gained great reputation amongst the Turks, because
whenever he prostrated himself before the Deity, his sheep imitated his
example. Katana has a bath, and near it the Sheikh has a good house. The
villagers cultivate mulberry trees to feed their silk worms, and some
cotton, besides corn. The day after my arrival I engaged two men to shew
me the way to the ruins. We began to cross the lower branches of the
Djebel Essheikh, at the foot of which Katana is situated, and after an
hour and a quarter came to Bir Karme, likewise called El Redhouan, a
spring in a narrow valley. We rode over mountainous ground in the road
to Rasheya, passed another well of
CASTLE OF BOURKUSH.
[p.49]spring water, and at the end of four hours reached Rahle, a
miserable Druse village, half an hour to the right of the road from
Katana to Rasheia. The ruins are to the north of the village, in the
narrow valley of Rahle, and consist principally of a ruined temple,
built of large square stones, of the same calcareous rock used in the
buildings of Baalbec: little else remains than the foundations, which
are twenty paces in breadth, and thirty in length; within the area of
the temple are the foundations of a circular building. Many fragments of
columns are lying about, and a few extremely well formed capitals of the
Ionic order. Upon two larger stones lying near the gate, which probably
formed the architrave, is the figure of a bird with expanded wings, not
inferior in execution to the bird over the architrave of the great
temple at Baalbec; its head is broken off; in its claws is something of
the annexed form, bearing no resemblance to the usual figure of the
thunderbolt. On the exterior, wall, on the south side of the temple, is
a large head, apparently of a female, three feet and a half high, and
two feet and a half broad, sculptured upon one of the large square
stones which form the wall: its features are perfectly regular, and are
enclosed by locks of hair, terminating in thin tresses under the chin.
This head seems never to have belonged to a whole length figure, as the
stone on which it is sculptured touches the ground. Near the ruins is a
deep well. A few hundred paces to the south, upon an eminence, are the
ruins of another edifice, of which there remain the foundations of the
walls, and a great quantity of broken columns of small size.
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