We rode next day in two and a half hours to Ḳaraḳôsh, where there are no less than seven churches. Three of them stand outside the village, each surrounded by its fortress wall, which usually encloses one or two small living-rooms besides the church. They reminded me forcibly of the walled Coptic monasteries of Egypt, but the monastic buildings were smaller. Between them stretched fields of barley wherein the villagers, standing in line, were pulling up the crops to the strains of the bagpipes. The churches were oriented almost at haphazard, and provided with the smallest doors, and windows to correspond. The interiors were so dark that I abandoned all hope of photographing the ornaments upon the inner doors,[158] though I made a rapid sketch of the lintel over the sanctuary door of Mâr Shim’ûn (Fig. 175). Above it was a slab bearing a floral Persian pattern incised upon the stone. Inside the town several of the churches had recently been repaired, or were in process of reparation. A young priest, Kas Yûsef, showed me the work, and gloried in the replacing of old and ruined churches by new and brand-new edifices. New lamps for old, but it was the old lamp that could summon the genius, and I realized the sound moral of the fairy story as I watched the refurbishing of ancient walls at Ḳaraḳôsh; but I did not impart my impression to the Syrian priest, whose ardour it would have been unkind to damp. The Syrians have annexed most of the larger churches, so said the worthy Jacobite father who brought me the key of Mâr Shim’ûn, and he told his tale not without a touch of bitterness. Yet it would have been folly to blink the fact that he was no match for Kas Yûsef, who was young and eager, and had been trained in a French school at Môṣul. Twenty minutes beyond Ḳaraḳôsh we came to the ruined church of Mâr Yuhanna Deleimoyya (St. John the Deleimî), which no one has troubled to repair, though it had beautiful carved lintels and domes adorned with plasterwork. Thence we rode for an hour through cornlands to Bârtallâ, and saw Bâ’ashikâ at the foot of the hills. They were real hills which lay before us, not the bare desert ridges which were all the heights we had seen since we crossed over Lebanon on the way to Aleppo. Here were the buttresses of mightier ranges than Lebanon, the alps of Kurdistân which end the land of the two rivers. As we climbed upwards, the corn grew greener, the grass deeper, the flowers more brilliant along the edge of trickling streams. But my companions paid no heed to these marvels. Jûsef’s thoughts were busy with the great cities he had seen since he set forth on his travels, and especially with Môṣul, last and therefore fairest in his memory. He rehearsed its advantages to the Môṣul zaptieh, and ’Abdullah was well pleased to listen to such talk. “Not even in Aleppo,” said Jûsef magnanimously, “do you find better bread.”