Page:Syria, the land of Lebanon (1914).djvu/256

SYRIA, THE LAND OF LEBANON as to what it was—this huge, symmetrical object rising so abruptly from the great, flat plain, and seeming doubly immense because of the clear air and the absence of any neighboring elevation with which to compare its height. The acropolis is, indeed, no insignificant structure. The people of Homs believe it to be entirely artificial, and its appearance is in favor of such an hypothesis. The circular hill is almost a thousand feet in diameter and its platform stands a hundred feet above the plain. The sides rise so steeply that it would be impossible to scale them without a ladder; and, to make the summit absolutely inaccessible to an enemy, all the outer slope of the mound formerly bore a slippery coating of small, square basalt blocks. At present the platform is reached by a long, winding path; but even this is so steep as to be almost dangerous in places. During the Crusades the fortress of Homs was held alternately by the Christians and the Saracens; and it has suffered from so many assaults that nothing of the old castle now remains save a few fragments of tumbling wall and a ruined gateway.

As we came down into the plain and had a nearer view of the acropolis, we seemed to distinguish a multitude of houses beneath it; but the difficulty of getting a true perspective had deceived us. The city lay beyond and lower; what we now saw were not houses but graves. It was a great metropolis of the dead; thousands and tens of thousands of mounds [ 206 ]