Page:Cliff Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe.djvu/36



ERODOTUS, speaking of the Ligurians, says that they spent the night in the open air, rarely in huts, but that they usually inhabited caverns. Every traveller who goes to the Riviera, the old Ligurian shore, knows, but knows only by a passing glance, the Etang de Berre, that inland sea, blue as a sapphire, waveless, girt about by white hills, and perhaps he wonders that Toulon should have been selected as a naval port, when there was this one, deeper, and excavated by Nature to serve as a harbour. The rocks of S. Chamas that look down on this peaceful sheet of water, rarely traversed by a sail, are riddled with caves, still inhabited, as they were when Herodotus wrote 450 years before the Christian era.

The following account of an underground town in Palestine is from the pen of Consul Wetzstein, and describes one in the Hauran. "I visited old Edrei—the subterranean labyrinthic residence of King Og—on the east side of the Zanite hills. Two sons of the sheikh of the village—one fourteen and the other sixteen years of age—accompanied me. We took with us a box of matches and two candles. After we had gone down the slope for some time, we came to a dozen rooms which, at present, are used as goat stalls and storerooms for straw. The passage became gradually smaller, until at last we were compelled to lie down flat and creep along. This extremely difficult and uncomfortable progress lasted for about eight minutes, when we were obliged to jump down a steep well, several feet in depth.