ḲAL'AT SIM'ĀN, THE APSE
ḲAL'AT SIM'ĀN, THE WEST DOOR
Next day I set off with Mūsa to explore the villages in the Jebel Sim'ān to the east and north-east of the church of St. Simon. We rode almost due east for rather less than an hour to Burjkeh, which exhibited all the characteristics of these villages of the extreme north. It had the tall square tower, which is nearly universal. All the stone work was massive, the blocks frequently laid not in courses, or if so laid, the courses showed great variety of depth. The church had a square apse, built out beyond the walls of the nave, and a running moulding hooded each window, passed along the level of the sill from one window to another, and ended beyond the last in a spiral, as though it had been a bit of ribbon festooned over the openings with the surplus rolled up. This moulding is peculiar to sixth-century decoration in North Syria. The houses of Burjkeh were very simple square cottages, built of polygonal masonry. Mūsa got wind of a newly opened tomb near the church. I contrived with some difficulty to crawl down into it, and was rewarded by finding on one of the loculi the date 292 of the era of Antioch, which corresponds to 243 A.D. Below the date were three lines of Greek inscription, much defaced. We rode on for half an hour to Surkanyā, a deserted village, charmingly situated at the head of a shallow rocky valley in which there were even a few trees. The houses were exceptionally massive in construction, with heavy stone balconies forming a porch over the door. One was dated, and the year was 406 A.D. The church was almost exactly similar to that at Burjkeh. Another three quarters of an hour to the north and we reached Fāfertīn, where, it began to rain. We took shelter under an apse, which was all that remained of a church larger than any we had yet seen, but rude in workmanship.[15] The village was inhabited by a few families of Yezīdi Kurds. In the streaming rain we rode for an hour north-east to Khirāb esh Shems, but could do nothing there owing to the weather, and so north by Kalōteh to Burj el Kās, where I found my tents pitched on a damp sward. Mūsa was much distressed by the heavy rain, and said that the wet spring had been disastrous to his fields, washing down the soil from the high ground into the valleys. The work of denudation, which has so greatly diminished the fertility of North Syria, is still going forward.
A FUNERAL MONUMENT, ḲĀṬURĀ
At Burj el Kās there was a square tower on the top of the hill and some old houses that had been repaired and re-inhabited by the Kurds. On one lintel I saw the date 406 A.D., on another an inscription difficult to decipher. The end of this stone was hidden by the angle of a rebuilt house, but peering along it I could just make out that there was a small carving at the extreme point. The owner of the house announced that it represented without doubt the Lady Mary. This would have been a curious addition to the meagre collection of sculpture in North Syria, as well as a theological innovation, and I expressed my regret that I could not see it better. Thereupon my friend fetched a pickaxe and chipped off a corner of his house, and the figure of the Virgin proved to be a Roman eagle.