"Murder is like the spilling of water!" she groaned. "Oh Merciful!"
It was late when the women left me. One of them offered to pass the night in my room, but I refused politely and firmly.
WINDOWS OF THE BANQUET HALL
Next day I was wakened by thunder and by hailstones rattling against my shutters. There was nothing for it but to spend another twenty-four hours under the Ḳāimaḳām's roof and be thankful that we had a roof to spend them under. I explored the castle from end to end, with immense satisfaction to the eternal child that lives in the soul of all of us and takes more delight in the dungeons and battlements of a fortress than in any other relic of antiquity. Ḳal'at el Ḥuṣn is so large that half the population of the village is lodged in the vaulted substructures of the keep, while the garrison occupies the upper towers. The walls of the keep rise from a moat inside the first line of fortifications, the line through which we had passed the night before by the vaulted gallery. The butcher of the castle lodged by the gateway of the inner wall; every morning he killed a sheep on the threshold, and those who went out stepped across a pool of blood as though some barbaric sacrifice were performed daily at the gate. The keep contained a chapel, now converted into a mosque and a banquet hall with Gothic windows, the tracery of which was blocked with stones to guard those who dwelt within against the cold. The tower in which I was lodged farmed part of the highest of the defences and rose above three stories of vaults. A narrow passage from it along the top of the wall led into a great and splendid chamber, beyond which was a round tower containing a circular room roofed by a fourfold vault, and lighted by pointed windows with rosettes and mouldings round the arches. The castle is the "Kerak of the Knights" of Crusader chronicles. It belonged to the Hospitallers, and the Grand Master of the Order made it his residence. The Egyptian Sultan Malek ed Dāher took it from them, restored it, and set his exultant inscription over the main gate. It is one of the most perfect of the many fortresses which bear witness to the strange jumble of noble ardour, fanaticism, ambition and crime that combined to make the history of the Crusades—a page whereon the Christian nations cannot look without a blush nor read without the unwilling pity exacted by vain courage. For to die in a worthless cause is the last extremity of defeat. Kerak is closely related to the military architecture of southern France, yet it bears traces of an Oriental influence from which the great Orders were not immune, though the Templars succumbed to it more completely than the Hospitallers. Like the contemporary Arab fortresses the walls increased in thickness towards the foot to form a sloping bastion of solid masonry which protected them against the attacks of sappers, but the rounded towers with their great projection from the line of the wall were wholly French in character. The Crusaders are said to have found a castle on the hill top and taken it from the Moslims, but I saw no traces of earlier work than theirs. Parts of the present structure are later than their time, as, for instance, a big building by the inner moat, on the walls of which were carved lions not unlike the Seljuk lion.
ḲAL'AT EL ḤUṢN, WALLS OF THE
INNER ENCEINTE
After lunch I waded down the muddy hill to the village and called on the Sitt Ferīdeh and her husband. There were another pair of Christians present, the man being the Sāḥib es Sandūḳ, which I take to be a kind of treasurer. The two men talked of the condition of the Syrian poor. No one, said the land surveyor, died of hunger, and he proceeded to draw up the yearly budget of the average peasant. The poorest of the fellaḥīn may earn from 1000 to 1500 piastres a year (£7 to £11), but he has no need of any money except to pay the capitation tax and to buy himself a substitute for military service. Meat is an unknown luxury; a cask of semen (rancid butter) costs 8s. or 10s. at most; it helps to make the burghul and other grains palatable, and it lasts several months. If the grain and the semen run low the peasant has only to go out into the mountains or into the open country, which is no man's land, and gather edible leaves or grub up roots. He builds his house with his own hands, there are no fittings or furniture in it, and the ground on which it stands costs nothing. As for clothing, what does he need? a couple of linen shirts, a woollen cloak every two or three years, and a cotton kerchief for the head. The old and the sick are seldom left uncared for; their families look after them if they have families, and if they are without relations they can always make a livelihood by begging, for no one in the East refuses to give something when he is asked, though the poor can seldom give money. Few of the fellaḥīn own land of their own; they work for hire on the estates of richer men. The chief landowners round Ḳal'at el Ḥuṣn are the family of the Dānadisheh, who come from Tripoli. Until quite recently the government did not occupy the castle; it belongs to the family of the Zā'bieh, who have owned it for two hundred years, and still live in some rooms on the outer wall. The Treasurer broke in here and said that even the Moslem population hated the Ottoman government, and would infinitely rather be ruled by a foreigner, what though he were an infidel—preferably by the English, because the prosperity of Egypt had made so deep an impression on Syrian minds.