We passed the next day in walking about the village, which contains about two hundred houses and five churches. The inhabitants, Syrian Christians, fabricate machlas and black abas, and pay little attention to agriculture, from want of water, which is sensibly felt. There is only one little spring in the village, the distribution of the water being regulated by an hour-glass. It scarcely suffices to water the gardens, which, in a climate where it seldom rains, are unproductive without watering. Some years there does not fall a drop of rain. The produce of the soil is hardly enough for six months’ consumption; and, for the remainder of the year, the inhabitants are obliged to have recourse to Homs. In the middle of the village there arises an ancient tower of prodigious height. It dates from the foundation of a colony whose history the sheik told us. The founders were natives of Tripoli in Syria, where their church still exists. At the most flourishing period of the Eastern empire, the Greeks, full of pride and rapacity, tyrannised over the conquered people. The governor of Tripoli overwhelmed the inhabitants with exactions and cruelty; these, too few to resist, and unable to bear the yoke, concerted together to the number of three hundred families; and having secretly collected together all the valuables they could carry away, they departed without noise in the middle of the night, went to Homs, and from thence moved towards the desert of Bagdad, where they were overtaken by the Greek troops sent in pursuit of them by the governor of Tripoli. They made an obstinate and sanguinary resistance; but too inferior in numbers to conquer, and resolved on no account to submit any longer to the tyranny of the Greeks, they entered into negotiation, and obtained permission to build a village on the spot of the battle, agreeing to remain tributary to the governor of Tripoli. They established themselves at this place, at the entrance of the desert, and called their village Saddad (obstacle.) This is all that the Syrian chronicle contains worthy of remark.