The ruined town of Baalbec contains about seventy Metaweli families, and twenty-five of Catholic Christians. Amidst its ruins are two handsome mosques, and a fine bath. The Emir lives in a spacious building called the Serai. The inhabitants fabricate white cotton cloth like that of Zahle; they have some dyeing houses, and had, till within a few years, some tanneries. The men are the artizans here, and not the women. The property of the people consists chiefly of cows, of which every house has ten or fifteen, besides goats and sheep. The goats are of a species not common in other parts of Syria; they have very long ears, large horns, and long hair, but not silky like that of the goats of Anatolia. [p.16]The breed of Baalbec mules is much esteemed, and I have seen some of them worth on the spot £30 to £35. sterling. October 1st.--After having again visited the ruins, I engaged a man in the forenoon, to shew me the way to the source of the rivulet called Djoush [Arabic]. It is in a Wady in the Anti-Libanus, three quarters of an hour distant from Baalbec. The rivulet was very small, owing to the remarkable dryness of the season, and was lost in the Wady before it reached the plain; at other times it flows down to Baalbec and joins the river, which, after irrigating the gardens and fields round the town, loses itself in the plain. A little higher in the mountain than the spot where the water of the Djoush first issues from the spring, is a small perpendicular hole, through which I descended, not without some danger, about sixteen feet, into an aqueduct which conveys the water of the Djoush underground for upwards of one hundred paces. This aqueduct is six feet high and three feet and a half wide, vaulted above, and covered with a thick coat of plaister; it is in perfect preservation; the water in it was about ten inches deep. In following up this aqueduct I came to a vaulted chamber about ten feet square, built with large hewn stones, into which the water falls through another walled passage, but which I did not enter, being afraid that the water falling on all sides might extinguish the only candle that I had with me. Below this upper passage, another dark one is visible through the water as it falls down. The aqueduct continues beyond the hole through which I descended, as far as the spot where the water issues from under the earth. Above ground, at a small distance from the spring, and open towards it, is a vaulted room, built in the rock, now half filled with stones and rubbish. Ten or twelve years ago, at the time when the plague visited DEIR EL AKHMAR [p.17]these countries and the town of Baalbec, all the Christian families quitted the town, and encamped for six weeks around these springs.