Thirty miles to our right, Jebel Hauran, also known as the “Druse Mountain,” rises from the level sea of grain like a long, low island. At such a distance we find it difficult, even in this crystal air, to realize that the isolated mountain is really forty miles long and only a little short of six thousand feet high. It is one of the few localities in the region where are still found the once famous “oaks of Bashan.”[18] Since the religious struggles which drenched Syria with blood in 1860, many thousand Druses have migrated from Lebanon to the Hauran, where the special retreat and stronghold of this proud, brave, relentless people is the mountain which bears their name. Hither they flee from the conscription; here they defy the hated tax-collector, flaunt their contempt of the weak Turkish government and, as is their wont everywhere, waste their own strength in bitter family feuds. A very ancient and plausible Christian tradition, which since the rise of Islam has also been accepted implicitly by the Moslems, identifies the Hauran with the “Land of Uz” where dwelt the patriarch Job. Three towns on the western slopes of the Druse Mountain perpetuate his story. Bishop William of Tyre, writing in the twelfth century, mentions the popular belief that Job’s friend Bildad the Shuhite dwelt at Suweida, and the inhabitants of this village boast that the patriarch himself was their first sheikh. At Kanawat a group of very old ruins is commonly known as the “Convent of Job,” and at Bosra, the ancient capital of the Hauran, there is a Latin inscription in his praise. Probably this belonged to a sixth century leper asylum; for the suffering patriarch early came to be considered the special patron of those who, like himself, were afflicted with the most mysterious and loathsome of diseases. But it is in the plain that memories of this Biblical drama cluster most closely. Nawa, twenty miles northwest of Derʿa, has for two thousand years been honored as Job’s birthplace. An hour’s ride to the south of this village there stood fifteen hundred years ago a splendid church dedicated to the Man of Uz, and part of the ruined “Monastery of Job” is still in good enough condition to be used as Turkish barracks. Near by is shown the rock on which he leaned while arguing with his three friends—it is a small basalt monument erected by Rameses II.—also the stone trough in which he washed after his afflictions were ended, and the tomb of the patriarch and his wife.