We returned to Souf, not by the road over the mountain, but in following the course of the rivulet in the valley El Deir, which we reascended up to the village; we found the greater part of the narrow plain in the valley sown with wheat and barley by the people of Souf. Half an hour from the town, in the Wady, are the remains of a large reservoir for water, with some ruined buildings near it. This is a most romantic spot; large oak and walnut trees overshade the stream, which higher up flows over a rocky bed; nearer the village are some olive plantations in the Wady. We reached Souf in two hours from Djerash. I enquired in vain for a guide to Szalt; the return of the man who had engaged to conduct me made the others equally cautious, and nobody would accept of the fifteen piastres which I offered. I thought in unnecessary, therefore, to stop any longer at Souf, and left it the same evening, in order to visit Djebel Adjeloun. Our road lay W.N.W. up a mountain, through a thick forest of oak trees. In three quarters of an hour from Souf we reached the summit of the mountain, which forms the frontier between the district of Moerad and the Djebel Adjeloun. This is the thickest forest I had yet seen in RABBAD. [p.266]Syria, where the term forest ([Arabic] or [Arabic]) is often applied to places in which the trees grow at twenty paces from each other. In an hour and a half we came to the village Ain Djenne [Arabic], in a fertile valley called Wady Djenne, at the extremity of which several springs issue from under the rock. May 3d.--There are several christian families at Ain Djenne. In the neighbouring mountain are numerous caverns; and distant half an hour, is the ruined village of Mar Elias. When enquiring for ruins, which might answer to those of Capitolias, I had been referred to this place, no person in these mountains having knowledge of any other ruins. An olive plantation furnishes the principal means of subsistence to the eighty families who inhabit the village of Ain Djenne.