On
The Outside Of The Town Are Several Sepulchral Caves, And A Few Coffins.
The town walls on the E. side are yet standing; they are very neatly
built with small stones, with a square pillar at every six or seven
paces, about nine feet high.
The ruins extend for about half an hour
from south to north, and consist of a number of public buildings,
churches, and private habitations, the walls and roofs of some of which
are still standing. I found no inscriptions here. The stone with which
the buildings are constructed is a soft calcareous rock, that speedily
decays wherever it is exposed to the air; it is of the same description
as that found in the buildings of the towns about the mountain of St.
Simon, and in the ruins of St. Simon, where not a single legible
inscription remains, though, as at Bara, traces of them are seen in many
places. We surveyed the town in all directions, but saw no building
worth noticing, except three tombs, which are plain square structures
surmounted with pyramids. The pyramidal summit of one of them has
fallen. The interior of these tombs is a square of six paces; on the
side opposite the door is a stone coffin; and two others in each of the
other two walls; the pyramidal roof is well constructed, being hollow to
the top, with rounded angles, and without any interior support. On the
outside the pyramid is covered with thin slabs, on each of which is a
kind of knob, which gives the whole a very singular appearance. The
height of the whole building may be about twenty-four feet. In one of
the tombs is a window, the other is quite dark. Two of them stand near
together; a third is in a different part of the town. The sides of one
of the coffins is carved with a cross in the middle.
[p.132]The mode of construction in all the private habitations is
similar to that which I noticed in the ancient towns of the Haouran, and
which, in fact, is still in use in most of the Arab villages in Syria,
with this difference, that the latter build with timber and mud instead
of stone.
On the N. side of El Bara stands a castle, built in the Saracen or
Crusade style, with a spring near it, called Bir Alloun [Arabic], the
only one in the neighbourhood of the ancient town, and which apparently
was insufficient to the inhabitants, as we found many cisterns cut very
deep in the rock. Turning from the spring towards the present village,
we passed the tomb of a Turkish saint, called Kubbet Ibn Imaum Abou
Beker, where the son of Abou Beker is reported to have been killed: near
it is a cave, with eight receptacles for the dead. I saw there some
rocks of the same basaltic tufwacke which I met with in the Djebel el
Hasz and in ome of the districts of Haouran.
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