A little beyond the fort stood the village itself. All the intervening and surrounding fields were thickly strewn with the large hewn blocks of black basalt of which the houses of the former population had been constructed, and which, to judge from the area which they covered, quite justified the description of Yakubi, that in his day this was one of the chief towns of the province, and the centre of a very large population. The present squalid inhabitants, few in number, seemed to live in a perfect quarry of these old building-blocks. No difficulty had they in finding material wherewith to build their houses, their large cattle vaults, and enclosing yards. They simply piled the tumbled masses of stone in a little more regular order, one above another, to make walls of any height or thickness they chose, without mortar or cement, and had houses that would last forever. As all the stones were beautifully squared and shaped, they had far more symmetrical walls, thanks to the ancients, than if they had been left to themselves. These black, massive huts all jumbled together with their vaults and yards, without regular streets or lanes, formed one of the strangest looking villages I ever saw. In some cases the walls were formed of stones placed diagonally, in others horizontally, in others perpendicularly. The very roofs were of stone, with earth on the top of them to fill up the cracks. Where hewn stone is so abundant and wood almost impossible to obtain, it is astonishing what uses the former can be put to. And now came a search which I would willingly have protracted over days instead of over minutes, which were all I had to give to it. To “do” Khisfin thoroughly one ought to examine carefully every stone in every house, besides the acres of stones by which the present village is surrounded. As it was, I went into as many houses as I had time for, and made sketches of what ornamentation I found. The natives had evidently used as lintels for their doorways the stones which had served the ancients for the same purpose. These were usually four or even five feet long, and many of them were ornamented with curious devices. They were in part Crusading and in part Saracenic. There were the tablets with half-effaced escutcheons, rosettes, bosses, crosses, and other Crusading emblems, which left no doubt in my mind that this must have been at one time an important Crusading fortress, though in the only book relating to the crusades which I happen to have by me no mention is made of it. There were several of those curious carvings, difficult to describe, which characterize Saracenic architecture as an evidence that the Moslem conquerors of the crusaders had also had a hand in its adornment; but what was more interesting, there were floral wreaths and carved devices which are a feature in Byzantine art, which gave clear evidence that before the conquest of this province from the Byzantine empire in the