Charming Scenery. — Arab Summer Dwellings. — Ruins of
Apollonia. — Ancient Granaries. — Chapels over Saints’
Tombs. — Abd-el-Kader’s Warriors. — Temple of Bacchus.
The Wady Bil Ghadir, the Valley of Verdure, was one of the many
beautiful ravines in this country which particularly attracted
my admiration; it was one of my favourite haunts; and often did I
climb its sides—occasionally at the risk of my neck—or saunter
more safely in the perpetual shade of its stream-course. In the
neighbourhood of Grennah, the hills abound with beautiful scenes, and
these I gradually discovered in my rides; some of them exceeded in
richness of vegetation, and equalled in grandeur, anything that is to
be found in the Appenines. About a mile from the town on the south,
one comes upon extensive remains of a fortress situated on the edge
of one of these ravines, the Wady Leboaitha, which runs nearly due
east; the valley is filled with tombs, and frequented by countless
flights of wood-pigeons. Following the ravine, and turning to the
left, we enter the Wady Shelaleh, which presents a scene beyond my
powers of description. The olive is here contrasted with the fig,
the tall cypress and the dark juniper with the arbutus and myrtle,
and the pleasant breeze, which always blows through the valley,
is laden with balmy perfumes. In the midst of this wonderful
richness of nature appear the gray rocks, hollowed into large
and inaccessible caverns, or gently receding in wooded slopes,
and sometimes rising perpendicularly, and meeting so as to leave
but a narrow passage between them.
Between the range of hills on which Cyrene was built, and the
rising ground which so abruptly descends to the sea-shore, the
broad plain, which from above seems a flat expanse, is found to
be deeply indented with many wood-clad hollows. On their borders,
ruined buildings or crumbling tombs contrast with the wooden hut
of the present occupant of the soil—the monumental industry of
fallen civilisation with the slothful hut of victorious barbarism.
_August_ 29.—It was a bright cool morning when I started to
visit Marsa Souya, the old Apollonia. The road follows the line
of the cemetery until it reaches the hill whose secular cypresses
I have so often admired; hence it descends into the plain, taking
nearly a north-east direction. At an hour from Grennah I came upon
excavations which must have formed part of the dependencies of a
country-house. In a good-sized cave, into which one descends by
three steps, is seen a large circular basin hollowed in the rock,
four feet in diameter, and standing about ten inches above the
floor. In its centre is a square hole, as if for fixing an upright
beam. One side of the cave is occupied by a long stone bench,
in which is hollowed out a larger mortar, having a slit down the
outer side. There can be no reasonable doubt that this was an oil
press. The country still abounds with fine old olive trees, but
its inhabitants have forgotten their use; when the fruit is ripe,
they assemble their sheep and cattle round the trees and shake and
beat the branches, while the animals greedily devour the precious
produce as it falls to the ground. The plain is in this direction
covered with the olive mixed with the caroub, now loaded with its
long dark pods. When left thus to the hand of nature, the caroub
becomes an immense bush, pushing out suckers all round the parent
trunk, which in size is hardly to be distinguished among them. The
Bedawin have taken possession of many of the largest of these trees,
and make them their summer residence, clearing out the centre
and filling up the lower parts with walls of dry branches, above
which the dark-green foliage rises with strange effect to the eye,
but affording a most grateful shade from the sun. In such a bower I
found four men seated round a rude forge repairing broken muskets;
while in others women were employed in household cares, such as
the grinding of flour, or the weaving of the coarse hair-cloth
of which the winter tents are made. From here we turned to seek a
pass through the hills, and as the old road has now become, if not
impracticable, at least most difficult for horses, we took a path a
little to the left, passing over ground covered with old junipers;
the twisted and contorted ash-gray trunks of these trees, and their
small tufts of hoary green, for they have no other vegetation when
very old, give the forest an appearance of decrepitude. The trees
look like little old men bent, and bowed, and bald. From this the
descent to the coast, even by the better road we had followed,
is very precipitous. The supply of water had been forgotten, and
a leather bag of milk, offered by a goatherd whom we met, was most
welcome. Having at last, after much slipping and stumbling, reached
the point where the pass emerges from the hills, we found ourselves
in a fertile plain, which it took nearly an hour to traverse before
reaching the sea. The water is bad and scarce, and this plain is,
therefore, only inhabited in the winter, when it is sown with wheat
and barley, and as soon as these crops are cut, the Arabs, with
their tents, remove to a station in the hills. The inhabitants were
long since in the summer retreat, but we found two men threshing
corn by the antique process of treading, which, as all readers of
books of travels know, is still practised in parts of Egypt and
Syria. I do not remember to have seen the process described as
I found it practised here, and there may be others who may think
it as curious as it seemed to me. Four oxen abreast are fastened
together by the horns, their heads close to each other; a fifth is
in like way fastened to the inner one of these four, but the rope
which secures his horns is tied round the middle of the belly of
a sixth, whose head is in the same way fastened to him. This last
pair, when driven, form as it were a revolving pivot, round which
the four others move. One man drives them, and another is employed
in heaping fresh corn upon the floor, and removing the straw which,
by this process, is broken into small lengths, while the grain is,
after all, but imperfectly separated from it. Riding on through
the plain, we found it, though cultivated, extensively covered
with the beautiful evergreen shrub, called in Italy, and here by
the Arabs, _Baturne_; it yields a medicinal berry. We now reached
a group of low rocks hollowed out into many sepulchral caves. The
soil has a reddish tint (whose reflection is heating to the eyes),
which with a bright sun made the ride a hot one. On the sea-shore,
just without the town, and opposite to a rocky island covered with
excavations and ruins, we found a well of very brackish water,
which is the only one in this neighbourhood; the town had been
formerly supplied by the water of a fountain nearly three miles
off, conveyed to it by an aqueduct, portions of whose ruins we had
passed. This want of water renders a stay here very inconvenient,
and prevented me following my original intention of spending some
days in this place. The city was built on a semicircular line of
rocks close to the shore, and buildings are still visible beneath
the waters which have here encroached upon the old boundaries,
probably by subsidence of the land. The fortifications on the
land side are well preserved, and remarkable for a large round
tower still almost entire, which rises at the south-west corner;
it is connected with some large buildings in this part of the city,
apparently of a castle; towers flank the wall at irregular distances,
and the position of one gate is well marked, though now blocked up
by fallen ruins. Clambering over the wall one gains the interior
of the city, which is crowded with heaps of ruins, and presents
the same confusion as a child’s castle of wooden bricks when
the last story has rendered it top-heavy and the whole falls upon
itself. Some arches rise above the soil, and in a few places pieces
of wall; the ground is thickly strewed with large heaps of stone,
columns of white marble and cipollino, whose capitals are in general
of indifferent workmanship. The sites of ten large churches, each
with an apse, are easily traced; and the columns and cones of the
capitals, adorned with the hall and cross, seem to indicate the fifth
century as their date. The difficulty of excavating would be extreme,
on account of the size of the heaps of stone which cover the ground,
and the weight of the masses; but this circumstance, rendering it
almost impossible for the Arabs to make any researches among the
ruins, may probably have secured for the first person who is able
to undertake the costly task, a rich harvest of early Christian
antiquities. The theatre, outside the town, is more perfectly
preserved than anything within it; nearly one-half of the seats
remain, but the proscenium has long since fallen into the sea,
whose encroaching waters now fill the orchestra.
Returning by the same road I turned to the right, about an hour
and a half from Grennah, to see the great caves called Maghyenat
by the Arabs, and which are, in fact, supposed to have served as
magazines for the merchandise coming from Apollonia to Cyrene. They
are situated at the foot of a hill, which is covered with ruins,
including those of a temple; everything seems to indicate that
in this spot a considerable town must have once existed, though
the imperfect notices of the ancient geography of this country
which have reached us, do not mention a town or village in this
place. The caves are very extensive, supported by rude columns,
irregularly disposed. One has a square fore-court cut in the rock,
and seems to have been adorned with a façade; another has a broad
flight of steps leading down to the interior, which is covered with
an archway in masonry. There are three of these caves, from 100
to 120 feet square, and they show nothing that could lead to the
conjecture that they were ever intended for sepulture; while their
situation, as well as the name they have preserved to the present
day, render the supposition that they served as magazines highly
probable. I found one filled with hay and grain, and another was
occupied as the habitation of several families. Turning homewards
from this place, and crossing a deep ravine, we reached a very
large natural circus at the foot of the hills, from above which
flowed an abundant stream. The elliptical form was so perfectly
defined that it was long before I could persuade myself that it
had not been used as a circus in ancient times; but, though there
are remains of building about the fountain, the remainder showed
no appreciable marks of cutting away of the rock to form seats,
or of the addition of masonry to complete the circuit. Another hour
brought us, with the setting sun, back to the tents.
_Tuesday, September_ 7.—This morning I rode to the sea-shore,
taking a north-west direction, to visit some ruins, which an Arab had
assured me existed there. I was in hope of finding some remains of
Phycus, which must have existed in this direction, or of the Garden
of the Hesperides, which Scylax and other old authorities place in
its neighbourhood. The country as far as the hills differed in no
respect from that I had already seen—exhibiting a plain partly of
rich soil, partly of rock, and cut up with deep ravines. We rode down
the Wady El Agâra, and reaching the hills, found, at a distance of
two hours from Cyrene, ruins, apparently of a stronghold, on which
is now built a marābut, called Sidi Kelileh. It is remarkable that
so many of these chapels, raised over the graves of reputed saints,
should be met with in all Moslem countries, and that even the tomb
of the Prophet should be a mosque; for this mode of honouring the
dead is the object of a special prohibition, uttered, one would
think, in too solemn a moment to be lightly transgressed. In El
Tabaray’s account of the Prophet’s death, he relates, on the
authority of a tradition derived from Aïsha, his favourite wife,
that on the day when he died, as he lay covered with a black cloak,
his face to the wall, almost his last words were, “May God be
unpropitious to those who make the tombs of his prophets places of
prayer.” I know not how the difficulty is got over; perhaps, such
tombs (being inside the chapels, or inclosed in railings, so that
prayers are not said _upon_ them) are not supposed to come within
the meaning of the prohibition; in all Moslem countries many such
chapels are found, and in no country more frequently than in this,
where ignorant fanaticism still exists in a degree unequalled in
the other Turkish provinces I have visited.
From Sidi Kelileh we reached the summit of the range in an hour,
and saw the sea at a gun-shot from the base of the thickly-wooded
hill. Far to the right, the promontory of Nanstathmus, and about
half-way between, on the shore, the ruins of Apollonia; to the left,
the mountain gradually closing upon the sea, which, a little further
on, washes its base; but there is no promontory here visible, nor
had any of the natives ever heard of Ras-sem or Razat. The only
indication which I could find of a promontory was at a point called
El Bilanîch, where the shore makes a very slight bend outwards, and
above it the hills rise lofty, and very thickly wooded. A little to
the right of the place where I descended we found a spring of sweet
water, the only one on this coast—perhaps therefore the same at
which the companions of Ulysses landed, when driven by stress of
weather from off Cape Malia to the country of the Lotophagi. On the
sea-shore, to the left, are the ruins of a strong tower, built of
squared stones without cement, called by the Arabs Arbîah, which
seems to have served only as a fortalice, for there are no remains
to indicate here the site of a town. Further on to the west is
a curious shallow quarry cut in steps, from which the stones for
the tower seem to have been extracted; and a little further on,
a modern Arab khan, called Furtâs, in the walls of which ancient
materials are built. Thence I rode on to Bilanîeh, where I found
some excavations and levelled places on the rock, which may mark
the site of Phycus. The sea-line from here turning slightly west
by south-west, there seems no other place which will answer to the
description of Phycus. I now climbed the hill above El Bilanîeh,
and not finding the Garden of the Hesperides, whose golden fruit
would have been most grateful, I rested for a couple of hours under
a stunted ilex. The face of the hill was very steep, and the horses
had hard work among the smooth rocks in some places, but it only
took half an hour to reach the summit, from which the table-land
at once extends. Two hours and a quarter west by north-west of
Grennah, we came upon considerable ruins, consisting of a large
open reservoir; a small building with a well-preserved apse;
and a larger one, probably of Arab construction, as it contained
several pointed arches as well as one round arch. My guide called
this place Shuni. Eastward we met with numerous remains of building
and tombs, presenting nothing remarkable; their frequency, however
indicates the populous condition of the country in former times,
of which another proof presented itself on our road homewards in
a large and deep cistern, excavated in the rock, to receive the
rain-waters. After my Arabs had drunk of its very muddy water,
we rode onwards, crossing the Wady Mala’ab, pursued on our very
horses by the fierce barking of the dogs of an Algerian donâr, which
had been for many months pitched in the plain below Grennah. Its
inhabitants were as fine specimens of uncivil fanatics as one need
wish to meet; they did not even deign to call off their dogs when
the Christian stranger passed their circular encampment. Their
chief is somewhat more politic; he frequently visited my tents,
said that the English were good men, who beat the French, and then
begged a supply of shot or writing-paper. He and his companions had
long fought under Abd-el-Kader, and quitted their country rather
than submit to infidel domination.
To conclude my account of the more remarkable excursions around
Grennah, I shall here in a few words speak of the vast conduit which
exists at a place now called Saf-saf. It lies to the south-east
of Grennah, at a distance of an hour and three-quarters, and is
remarkable not only for its magnificent structure, which resembles
in size the Cloaca Maxima of Rome (though of a much later date),
but also for the inscriptions, or rather quarry-marks, which are
found on the stones of which the noble arch is built. These are
very curious, containing not only Greek characters, like those
in the reservoir at Cyrene (which this conduit seems to have been
destined to supply), but also other characters, resembling those of
the Tawaricks, or the Thugga inscription. The following I copied,
and I believe it is a tolerably complete list of all that exist in
this place: Α, [Symbol], Δ∇, ΤΡΟ, [Symbol], Π, [Symbols],
[Symbols], Κ [+ symbol] [Symbol], Ω, [Symbol], [Symbol], [+
symbol], ×, [Symbol], [Symbol], the last six being apparently
Libyan characters—a circumstance not to be wondered at, if we
consider that the aboriginal population of the country would probably
furnish a large contingent to the labouring classes. At one end the
walls are covered with Arabic inscriptions, recording the visits of
various Beys of Benghazi and other personages—a mark of interest
rarely met with in the East. The winter rains were still collected
in this reservoir; and when I was there at the end of summer,
notwithstanding the drought of the last years, there was still a
small supply of water remaining in one part of the vast archway.
The walls of the town are still to be traced, and the ground-plans
of several buildings; but none are of any importance, excepting
a small temple, with fluted pilasters, only wanting the roof and
fronton, which, with the entablature, lie on the ground before
it. It is mentioned by Della Cella as a temple of Bacchus, with a
frieze of vine-leaves and grapes, but of these I could distinguish
no trace, and I am inclined to think that the lichens with which
it is overgrown may have, at a distance, deceived him. The line
of tombs extends the whole way from Cyrene to Jafsuf, and a large
conduit covered with heavy stones runs along the side of the road.