contended, was the more necessary, as we should meet with no houses in our way, and, from the severity of the season, even the Bedouins might have removed their tents to the low countries and the plains. All my efforts to persuade him that by perseverance we might overcome every obstacle were useless, and as I could not prevail, there was nothing for me to do but to appear content.

After suffering a tedious morning of idle visits from men who had communicated all they knew before, I caught a spare hour to go up and see the castle of Assalt, the pride and wonder of all its inhabitants. This edifice is seated on the summit of a roundtopped hill, composed of white lime-stone, out of which a deep and wide ditch has been excavated all around its base, so that it is literally founded on a rock. The building consists of an outer wall of enclosure, about one hundred yards square, with towers at each corner, and in the centre of each of its sides. Within this enclosure is a square citadel, and from twenty to thirty private dwellings, inhabited by Mohammedans connected directly or indirectly with the sheikh of the town. The general aspect of the castle is that of a work of considerable antiquity, but there were no particular features decisive of its age or date of original construction. The masonry is good, and the stones are large: many of them six feet by three; and these smoothly hewn and neatly joined at the edges, but rough in the centre of the outer front, or what is called the rustic masonry of the Romans, like the work in the lower part of the castle of the Pisans, or palace of David at Jerusalem, which, indeed, this citadel of Assalt very strongly resembles. Much of the original pile was in ruins, but a portion of one of the square towers remained: the eastern face of this was about fifty feet high from the bottom of the ditch, even in its present state. At the foot of this was a sloping mole, faced with smooth stones, forming a casing to the living rock on which the castle stood; and this casing of masonry presented appearances of the marks of water, with which the ditch had no doubt formerly been filled. Within the castle is a fine spring of water,

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and from the well in which it is contained nearly the whole of the town is supplied. The original wall and tower have evidently been built upon by more modern hands, and of smaller and inferior materials; and the present gate of entrance into the castle has a pointed arch, well built, but doubtlessly constructed since the original erection of the edifice, being formed of smooth stones, unlike the rustic masonry of the castle generally, and of a smaller size as well as inferior workmanship. In different parts of this motley building, the Roman and the Saracen arch are seen together; but both of these appear to be modern additions, much posterior to the original building, the large rough stones, and the general aspect of which, give it the air of a place of higher antiquity than either Roman or Saracen times: the several portions are, however, now so confusedly mixed together that it would require great skill and patience to separate the one from the other.

At one corner of the citadel is a small mosque, frequented by the Mohammedan inhabitants of Assalt. Near this place we were shown two small European swivels, apparently two-pounders; they were each marked with a P., and the weights rudely cut on them were respectively 2cwt. 1qr. 18lbs., and 2cwt. 1qr. 16lbs. There was no device or emblem on them by which it could be determined from what nation they originally came: their appearance, however, was that of English ship-swivels, and the same circumstance induced me to think they could not be more than fifty years old. So rapidly, however, are things and events forgotten in countries where no written or printed records of them are kept, that no person at Assalt knew any thing of the history of these guns; although, from the difficulty of bringing such articles to an isolated spot like this, and from their being, probably, the only cannon that were ever known here, the circumstance of their first arrival at the town must have been an event of great importance at the time, and have been talked of for months and years afterwards. Here, too, within the castle, we saw the marble capital of a Corinthian column, small in size, and of inferior workmanship: but no one knew from

whence it came, or to what building it originally belonged, nor did I observe, throughout all the town of Assalt, any other vestige of Roman architecture, except this single capital.

At the bottom of the south-western valley, below and almost in the centre of the town,- for there are houses on both sides of the hill,- I observed a small square tower, which was said to have belonged to a mosque in that quarter long since destroyed, and the remaining portion of the work has nothing about it to lead to a contrary impression.

From the walls of the castle of Assalt the view of the surrounding objects is highly interesting. The north-western hills appeared covered with an unbroken sheet of snow, and the south-eastern hills had their hoary summits capped with the same wintry emblem while the cultivated valley, that half environed the hill on which the castle stood, presented a surface broken by green patches of garden land, terraced vine beds, corn fields, and olive grounds; and the town below rose like a series of steps or stages, the roof of one house serving as a platform on a level with the door of the one immediately above it.

On returning from my visit to the castle, I found, as usual, a number of visitors and enquirers assembled, both within the house and around the door. In the course of my conversation with them, I was glad to find one who had been a great traveller in the country round about these parts; and having drawn him into a communicative humour, and filled his pipe from my own tobacco-bag, he readily furnished me with the following information as to the bearings and distances of several of the principal places in the neighbourhood, computed from this town of Assalt. I had a small pocket compass with me, brought from Bombay, about the size of a watch, which had a traversing card, and was contained in a morocco case. In order to obtain the bearings, I placed this on the ground before the door, and bade my informant point with his hand, as nearly as he could, to the quarter in which particular places lay. The distance was computed by the only method known here,

namely, by days and hours, at a quick walking pace on horseback. Both the bearings and distances are thus, no doubt, imperfect, the former particularly; but, in a country so entirely unknown, and the whole of which is a blank in our best maps, even an approximation to the truth is valuable, and as such I readily availed myself of the opportunity to set down the names and relative positions of the several places named, as follows:

Bearings and Distances of Towns from Assalt.

Bearings and Distances of several Places lying in the Road to

There are many places of inferior note, which my informant thought too inconsiderable to name. For greater accuracy, the list was read over to him a second time after being written, and confirmed by his assent to the positions assigned.

Road back from Oom-el-Russās by another Route, through Ammān