News arrived that eighty people from Kuriet el ’Aneb (the well-known village of Abu Gosh on the Jerusalem road from Jaffa) were escaping to us across the hills, on account of troubles at their home.
Then we very soon lay down to sleep.
Tuesday 8th.—’Abdu’l ’Azeez and his two young sons escorted us in looking over the ruins of old Eleutheropolis, as their town was called in the period of early Christianity. These consist of a church near the great well, another on a hill farther eastwards called St Anna, or, as the Arabs pronounce it, Sandanna, and numerous extensive caverns, probably enlargements by art from nature.
The former church has a roof remaining only over one of the aisles; the ground plan of the whole edifice is, however, sufficiently marked out by the fragments of columns in situ.
St Anna is larger and more perfect than this; the semicircular apse is entire, and there are remains of other buildings attached to the church.
It stands on high ground, and commands a very fine prospect.
The caverns are formed in the substance of chalk hills, often in a circular form, with a rounded roof, through which an aperture admits both air and daylight. Antiquarians are puzzled to account for the origin of these, as they are too numerous and capacious to be needed for supply of water; besides that in common times the large well and aqueducts that bring water from a distance would suffice for that purpose. They are likewise too extensive and deep to be required for magazines of grain, such as the villages on the open plains cut into the underground rocks for preservation of their food from the raids of the Bedaween; perhaps, however, some were used for one of these purposes and some for the other.
Near the entrance of one of these excavations, in which there are passages or corridors with running ornament sculptured along each side, we found figures (now headless, of course, since the Moslem conquest) resembling church saints in Europe—one, indeed, had its head remaining, though disfigured, and the arms posed in the manner of the Virgin Mary when holding the infant Saviour. These were sculptured in the chalk rock itself, and standing in niches hollowed behind them. If these were really what they seemed to be, they must have been made in the era of the Latin
kingdom, for the Oriental Christians have never made images of the saints.
In two other of these caverns, high up on their sides or within the cupola, we saw short inscriptions of black paint, (if I remember rightly,) the large characters of which had very much the general forms of Cufic-Arabic, but not the Cufic of the old coins. There was also an ornamented cross in this cupola, and other crosses in other chambers. We were totally unable to satisfy ourselves as to how the inscriptions could have been written at such inaccessible heights. Certainly the present race of people are unable even to deface them, were they disposed to do so.