[p.126]Rieha, on the S. side of a narrow valley watered by a rivulet; it contains forty or fifty houses, all well built of square stones, which have been taken from the buildings of a town of the lower empire, which occupied the same site. The remains deserve notice, on account of the vast quantity of stone coffins and sepulchres. The mountain is a barren calcareous rock, of no great hardness. In some places are a few spots of arable ground, where the inhabitants of the village grow barley and Dhourra. On the side of the rivulet are some fruit trees. We were occupied the whole morning in visiting the neighbourhood of the village, which must have been anciently the burying place of all the great families of this district; the number of tombs being too considerable for so small a town as Kefr Lata appears to have been; no such sepulchres, or at least very few, are met with among the ruins of the large cities which we saw afterwards in the same mountain. Beginning on the west side of the village, I counted sixteen coffins and seven caves; the coffins are all excavated in the rock; the largest are nine feet long, and three feet and a half in breadth; the smaller seven feet long, and three feet broad; their depth is generally about five feet. In the greater part of them there is on one side a curved recess, cut in the rock, about four feet in length, and two feet in breadth. All these coffins had originally stone lids of a single block of stone, exactly covering the aperture of the coffin. Only a small proportion of these now remain entire, but there are some quite uninjured. I saw only two or three in which a sculptured frieze or cornice was carried along the whole length of the cover; the generality have only a few ornaments on the two ends; they are all of the annexed shape. The apertures of the coffins are invariably even with the surface of the ground, and the lids only are seen from without, as if lying upon the surface.