There are frequent remains of towers, dungeons, and even of castles with ramparts and ditches, in some of which are a few Barbary soldiers with nothing but a shirt and a musket. These ruins, however, are more commonly inhabited by owls, jackals, and scorpions.[71] The only remarkable antiquity at Ramla is the minaret of a decayed mosque, which, by an Arabic inscription, appears to have been built by the Sultan of Egypt. From the summit, which is very lofty, the eye follows the whole chain of mountains, beginning at Nablous, and skirting the extremity of the plain till it loses itself in the south. A ride of two hours brings the traveller to the verge of the mountains, where the road opens through a rugged ravine, and is formed in the dry channel of a torrent. A scene of marked solitude and desolation surrounds his steps as he pursues his journey in what is so simply described in the gospel as the "hill country of Judea." He finds himself amid a labyrinth of mountains, of a conical figure, all nearly alike, and connected with each other at their base. A naked rock presents strata or beds resembling the seats of a Roman amphitheatre, or the walls which support the vineyards in the valleys of Savoy. Every recess is filled with dwarf oaks, box, and rose-laurels. From the bottom of the ravines olive-trees rear their heads, sometimes forming continuous woods on the sides of the hills. On reaching the most elevated summit of this chain, he looks down towards the south-west on the beautiful valley of Sharon, bounded by the Great Sea; before him opens the Vale of St. Jeremiah; and in the same direction, on the top of a rock, appears in the distance an ancient fortress called the Castle of the Maccabees. It is conjectured that the author of the Lamentations came into the world in the village which has retained his name amid these mountains; so much is certain, at least, that the melancholy of this desolate scene appears to pervade the compositions of the prophet of sorrows. The unvarying manners of the East exhibit to the view of the stranger, at the present day, the same picture of rural innocence and simplicity which might have met the eye of the mother of the Redeemer when she came into this pastoral country to salute her cousin Elizabeth. Herds of goats, with pendent ears, sheep with large tails, and asses which remind you, by their beauty, of the onagra of Scripture, issue from the villages at the dawn of day. Arab women are seen bringing grapes to dry in the vineyards; others with their faces veiled, carrying pitchers of water on their heads, like the daughters of Midian.