The road, as it issues from Aleppo, rises gradually on to a heathy upland somewhat similar to Salisbury Plain. Here it soon becomes a mere wheel track--a good enough path to lead to a moorland farmstead, but a poor sort of thing to confide in for a journey of 200 miles. At every two or three leagues its stages are marked off by villages; generally forlorn little groups of one-storied flat-roofed stone hovels, but sometimes a more pretentious affair where the houses rise to two stories and which (on the strength of such superiority) feels justified in calling itself a town. Often even the meanest of these were formerly towns indeed, and instead of being called El Bab or Membij, were known by such high-sounding names as Bambyce and Hierapolis.[3] The hummocks and hollows which mark the foundations of their ancient edifices form a wide margin all around the outskirts, and the surface is strewn for acre on acre with dislocated fragments of columns and great squared blocks of stone. At one point where we made a short halt, we were able to decipher a few tags of Latin inscriptions;--_cos_, _divi_, _cæsar_ and a few other similar words. They were deeply, but rudely incised, as though cut in sheer idleness by some unoccupied soldier. A householder who saw us examining them led us to the door of his hut where he showed us another inscription. In this case the lettering was Arabic, and we could read no more than the name of Allah:--a fact which caused great consternation to our householder, for he had been using it as a threshold. We halted each night at some village _khan_, the Turkish synonym for the better known Persian word _caravanserai_, which forms the common house of entertainment both for man and beast. A typical _khan_ consists of a great square courtyard full of foul dust in dry weather and of fouler mud in wet. Often have we felt inclined to bless the hard frost at night in winter time, which has enabled us next morning to walk to our carriage on the top of the mud instead of wading through. The courtyard is enclosed by a range of miserable hovels--the sort of shanties which might perhaps pass muster as tool sheds in allotment gardens, those "lodges in gardens of cucumbers," which Isaiah considered the nadir of dilapidation. Some of these take rank as stables and others as guest chambers. In point of comfort and cleanliness there is little to choose between them; but occasionally the guest chambers are on an upper story, and then the humans are somewhat better off than the brutes. Let us assume, not to be too sanguine, that our room will be on the ground floor; and, not to be too despondent, that we shall get a room to ourselves.