forever and forever, it seemed to me, over parched deserts and rocky

hills, hungry, and with no water to drink. We had drained the goat-skins

dry in a little while. At noon we halted before the wretched Arab town

of El Yuba Dam, perched on the side of a mountain, but the dragoman said

if we applied there for water we would be attacked by the whole tribe,

for they did not love Christians. We had to journey on. Two hours later

we reached the foot of a tall isolated mountain, which is crowned by the

crumbling castle of Banias, the stateliest ruin of that kind on earth, no

doubt. It is a thousand feet long and two hundred wide, all of the most

symmetrical, and at the same time the most ponderous masonry. The

massive towers and bastions are more than thirty feet high, and have been

sixty. From the mountain's peak its broken turrets rise above the groves

of ancient oaks and olives, and look wonderfully picturesque. It is of

such high antiquity that no man knows who built it or when it was built.

It is utterly inaccessible, except in one place, where a bridle-path

winds upward among the solid rocks to the old portcullis. The horses'

hoofs have bored holes in these rocks to the depth of six inches during

the hundreds and hundreds of years that the castle was garrisoned. We

wandered for three hours among the chambers and crypts and dungeons of

the fortress, and trod where the mailed heels of many a knightly Crusader

had rang, and where Phenician heroes had walked ages before them.

We wondered how such a solid mass of masonry could be affected even by

earthquake, and could not understand what agency had made Banias a

ruin;

but we found the destroyer, after a while, and then our wonder was

531

The Innocents Abroad