The troglodyte dwellings of Bled Kebira are extremely difficult to describe because I can think of nothing which will serve as a satisfactory basis of comparison. The method of digging one of these _ghars_, as they are called, is as follows. Selecting a site where the soil is firm and where there is good drainage, the home-builder proceeds to sink a shaft, perhaps twenty feet square and from twenty to thirty feet deep. The bottom of this shaft is leveled off and forms a patio or courtyard. The next step is to excavate the rooms, the doors of which open on the shaft; some are on the same level as the courtyard, others are higher up and reached by ropes. Finally, a tunnel, sometimes several hundred feet in length, is driven from the courtyard to the surface of the earth, its entrance, usually in a cranny of the hills, secured against intruders by a stoutly timbered door with enormous hinges of hand-wrought iron. Some of these massive doors, like the dwellings to which they gave admittance, were quite obviously of enormous age, possibly a thousand years or more. The rooms, generally of good size, with vaulted ceilings, were astonishingly neat and clean, their walls whitewashed and decorated with primitive designs in vivid colors; the scanty furniture—beds, tables, and divans—cut from the rock itself. The disadvantage of this is that the furniture cannot be moved, but it has its compensation in the fact that dust cannot be swept, and refractory collar-buttons cannot be lost, under pieces of furniture which rise solidly from the floor, of which, indeed, they are a part. In one dwelling which we visited, that of the sheikh, the bed, which was about the size of a billiard-table, had been plastered over and the plaster whitewashed, and the whitewash, in turn, had been rudely frescoed in brilliant reds and greens. Ranged along one side of the kitchen, which was separated from the bedroom only by a calico curtain, stood great jars of pottery, recalling those in which the Forty Thieves were boiled alive, but here used for such prosaic purposes as the storage of water, olive-oil, and wine.