Page:Palestine Exploration Fund - Quarterly Statement for 1894.djvu/141

Rh The Lebanon lies between the sea on the west and the plain of the Beka'a on the east. With the fleet along the coast and the army on the plain, the Emir, who had lost heart at the death of his son in a skirmish with the Turks, gave up active resistance and fled with a few followers to the Cliff Castle in the Jezzîn valley, which he is said to have fortified previously, perhaps in anticipation of some such necessity. We may attribute the tower at the entrance to him and perhaps the masonry in the upper chamber, with the tiling of the water-channel, but I am inclined to think that the wall-hewn chambers were ancient excavations which he utilised. The Cliff Castle resembles in many particulars those of Ma'lula, which I described in the Quarterly Statement of April, 1890. The chambers there I am inclined to think even older than the Greek inscriptions cut in their walls.

Here for several months the Emir held out against the besiegers. With a good water supply, ample corn-places, which his prudence had doubtless filled, comfortable chambers, glorious air, and a wide look-out, the siege need not have been such an uncomfortable one. At first the besiegers kept below the cliff's but finding it impossible to scale them went around to the high ground above. Descent seemed equally impossible. Treachery, as usual, betrayed the castle. A goatherd led the Turks to the spring which furnished water to the besieged. Tradition has it that the Turks slew a number of sheep and oxen, defiling the water with the blood and entrails. The Emir, finding his water supply endangered, was let down the cliff by ropes and with his secretary and three sons sought another hiding place.

The Cliff Castle we have been describing is in the range of cliffs that crowns the eastern slope of the Jezzîn valley. Below the cliffs the ground slopes somewhat irregularly westwards, until it comes to an edge at the top of another range of cliffs towering above the stream-bed, not unlike the higher range. Between the base of these cliffs and the stream-bed there is a steep slope, strewn with rocky fragments fallen from the cliff above. In the face of the cliff some 30 feet above its base is the mouth of a cave, inaccessible from below, as the cliff projects out so as to overhang the slope. Square holes cut in the face of the cliff from the cave-mouth to the top suggest that it was once approached from above by a ladder set up against beams projecting from these holes. In time of danger the ladder might have been pulled down into the cave. I have not yet visited this cave, and am indebted for a description of it to the Rev. William K. Eddy, of Sidon. He says that the cave is not wide but that it is very deep, extending quite 200 feet back into the mountain. Water trickles from the rock of the cave and is collected in cisterns hewn in the floor.

To this apparently inaccessible den the Emir escaped. Treachery probably put the Turks on his track. Unable to approach the mouth of the cave they determined to mine down into it, and a square cutting in the top of the rock above still witnesses to their attempts. More successful were their mining operations from below. Fukhredeen was one day