Alkosh, at the foot of the steeps, is just an unmitigated sun trap; and the town seems positively sizzling under the blaze that is poured on it from the south. It is a mean little hole; but its synagogue boasts a notable shrine in the tomb of the prophet Nahum, who of course also holds local brevet rank (like Jonah) as a Mussulman saint. Commentators generally assert that the Elkosh of Nahum was in Palestine; but local tradition adheres unshakenly to the claims of the Assyrian Alkosh, and the Jews make an annual pilgrimage in order to visit this shrine. After all there is much to be urged for it. Nahum was "of the children of the captivity," and he certainly knew his Nineveh better than most dwellers in Palestine can have done. It was a weird and striking effect that we witnessed from it next morning. The clouds lay low and horizontal above the plain beneath us; and many of them seemed to have sunk on to the ground, and looked exactly like lakes under the level rays of the rising sun. As his orb rose higher they lifted, and dispersed into wreaths of vapour. How well might such an effect have inspired the words of the Prophet, "Nineveh is of old as a pool of water: yet they shall flee away!" Some three miles east of Alkosh lies a great recess in the mountains--hardly so much a valley as a deep pocket among the cliffs. And at the end of this pocket is ensconced one of the most interesting Christian relics in these regions--the ancient monastery of Rabban Hormizd, the Scetis of the uttermost east. Rabban Hormizd is no western monastery; it is a typical Oriental Laura: a rookery of independent hermits rather than a community of monks. And to speak of it as a "rookery" is hardly so descriptive as to call it a warren of sand-martins; for the anchorites' cells are all caves, some natural and some artificial, burrowed into the escarpments of a great natural _cirque_. Rabban Hormizd, the original and eponymous hermit, established himself here in the eighth century; and the fame of his singular sanctity soon drew hundreds of other eremites to the neighbourhood of his lonely retreat. Here he lived praying, fasting, and macerating himself after the manner of the Great St. Anthony; and wrestling mightily with the devils who notoriously frequent such desert spots. He was evidently a believer in "close action," for the adjoining pocket is known as the Vale of Devils; and, appropriately enough, a little village of "Devil-Worshippers" is situated at the mouth of it to this day.