The Crusading King Baldwin II., in 1121 A.D., made a raid into this country, and overturned a Moslem fortress near Jerash. The Crusaders had other outposts at Tibneh, at Salt, and on the conical hill of Rubud; but the broad plains of the Hauran, which Baldwin III. endeavoured in vain to conquer, were never wrested from the Sultans of Damascus.
The road to Jordan from Gerasa passes along in sight of the distant castle of Rubud and by the ancient village of Reimun, a well-watered place with ancient tombs. Here, I believe, we should probably place the celebrated Ramoth Gilead, which has, for no reason at all, been identified with Es Salt, a town which takes its name from the old episcopal title Saltus Hieraticus, due to the woods on the hill slopes not far off. From Reimun the path winds down into the beautiful “Valley of the Roebuck” (Wâdy Hamûr), full of picturesque glades. The valley was green with young corn when I visited it, and the stream bordered with oleanders. On the hillsides a dense wood of oaks was topped by dark pines on the higher part of the ridge. Lentisk, arbutus, oleaster, formed its underwood, and here, as on Carmel, the blackbird’s song may be heard. The jay, cuckoo, hoopoe, and tomtit I also found in these woods, with the “murmuring of innumerable doves,” as in the Nazareth oaks.
Among the flowers which I saw in spring on the slopes of Gilead are many of our English species. Clover, ragged-robin, red and white cistus, clematis, crow’s-foot, purple lupins, squills, the pink phlox, the red or blue anemone, cyclamen, corn-flowers, pheasant’s eye, salvia, asphodel (both blue and yellow), vetches, wild mustard, marigold, borage, moon-daisies, cytizus, orchids, and the white broom, Star of Bethlehem, poppies, tulips, and buttercups, all grow in the grassy dells. Mock orange, hawthorn, honeysuckle, and antirrhinum, the arbutus and the lauristinus, are among its shrubs. Nowhere else in Palestine save in the Jordan Valley have I seen such fields of flowers; but the ravines and hill-slopes of the beautiful Sorrento scenery near Naples both in fauna and flora very nearly approach the natural history of Gilead.
These scenes were among the last through which it was my lot to pass in Syria. Hurrying back from Damascus to Jerusalem, I rejoined my companions, and we went down to Jaffa, where we took the northern steamer in order to escape Alexandria by a longer sea-route. Rumours had already reached us of the massacres in Egypt, and my reports concerning the unsettled state of the Levant I found to have been already confirmed by the telegrams which were arriving in England when we returned. The steamer was crowded with refugees, and it was not many weeks later that I again stood in the familiar streets of Alexandria, and saw the city of gutted houses, and the ruins which covered the great square with heaps of stone and of plaster. Thus our explorations may be said to have been continued to the last days of peace, before the Levant became the theatre of historic events.