t a living town, thriving and
prospering in its own dirty and dishevelled way, in the midst of a
country of nomads, growing in the last twenty years from six thousand to
fifteen thousand inhabitants, driving a busy trade with the surrounding
country, exporting famous raisins and dye-stuff made from sumach, the
seat of the Turkish Government of the Belka, with a garrison and a
telegraph office--decidedly a thriving town of to-day; yet without a
road by which a carriage can approach it; and old, unmistakably old!

The castle that crowns the eminence in the centre is a ruin of unknown
date. The copious spring that gushes from the castle-hill must have
invited men for many centuries to build their habitations around it.
The gray houses seem to have slipped and settled down into the curving
valley, and to have crowded one another up the opposite slopes, as if
hundreds of generations had found here a hiding-place and a city of
refuge.

We ride through a Mohammedan graveyard--unfenced, broken, neglected--and
down a steep, rain-gulleyed hillside, into the filthy, narrow street.
The people all have an Arab look, a touch of the wildness of the desert
in their eyes and their free bearing. There are many fine figures and
handsome faces, some with auburn hair and a reddish hue showing through
the bronze of their cheeks. They stare at us with undisguised curiosity
and wonder, as if we came from a strange world. The swarthy merchants in
the doors of their little shops, the half-veiled women in the lanes, the
groups of idlers at the corners of the streets, watch us with a gaze
which seems almost defiant. Evidently tourists are a rarity
here--perhaps an intrusion to be resented.

We inquire whether our baggage-train has been seen, where our camp is
pitched. No one knows, no one cares; until at last a ragged, smiling
urchin, one of those blessed, ubiquitous boys who always know everything
that happens in a town, offers to guide us. He trots ahead, full of
importance, dodging through the narrow alleys, making the complete
circuit of the castle-hill and leading us to the upper end of the
eastern valley. Here, among a few olive-trees beside the road, our white
tents are standing, so close to an encampment of wandering gypsies that
the tent-ropes cross.

Directly opposite rises a quarter of the town, tier upon tier of
flat-roofed houses, every roof-top covered with people. A wild-looking
crowd of visitors have gathered in the road. Two s