Instead of following closely the line of coast, I kept near the base of the Carmel range, reaching in about two hours from Carmel the village of El Tireh, where the mosque is part of an old Benedictine monastery, the massive walls of which have been utilized for religious purposes by the Moslems. Their worship has had little effect upon the inhabitants, who are the most notorious thieves and turbulent rogues in the whole country side. They are rich enough to indulge their taste for violence with comparative impunity, as they can always square it with the authorities. Their village is surrounded with a grove of thirty thousand olive-trees and the rich plain, extending to the sea, is nearly all owned by them. Indeed, their evil reputation keeps other would-be proprietors at a distance. Here the plain begins to slope backward from the sea, so as to prevent the water from the mountains from finding a natural outlet, and in summer the country becomes miasmatic and feverish.
From El Tireh, where the inhabitants treated me with great civility, I crossed the plain, and in an hour more reached an insignificant ruin called El Dustrey, a corruption of the crusading name “_Les Destroits_,” or “The Straights,” so called from a gorge in the limestone ridge, which here separates the plain from the sea. This very remarkable formation extends for many miles down the coast. It is a rugged ridge, varying from twenty to fifty feet in height, and completely cutting off the sea beach from the fertile plain behind. Here and there it is split by fissures, through which the winter torrents find their way to the sea. Skirting this ridge, we suddenly come upon an artificial cutting, just wide enough to allow the passage of a chariot. At the entrance, holes were cut into the rock on both sides, evidently used in ancient times for closing and barring a passage-way. The cutting through the rock was from six to eight feet deep and from sixty to eighty yards in length. The deep ruts of the chariot-wheels were distinctly visible. Here and there on the sides steps had been cut leading to the ridge, which had been fortified.
Passing through this cutting, we debouch upon a sandy plain and a reedy marsh, in which my companion had the year before killed a wild boar; and here we were in the presence of a majestic ruin. Immediately facing us was a fragment of wall, eighty feet high, sixteen feet thick, and thirty-five yards long. It towers to a height of one hundred and twenty feet above the sea, and is a conspicuous landmark. It has been partially stripped of the external layer of carved stone blocks, and has furnished a quarry to the inhabitants for some centuries. The wall had evidently once continued across the base of the promontory upon which the ancient fortress and town were built. Passing up a rocky passage and under an archway of comparatively modern date, and which could still be closed by means of massive wooden doors, we enter the _enceinte_, and discover that the whole promontory is underlaid with huge vaults. It became also evident that the immense fragment I have described was the outer wall of a large building, for on the inside were three ribbed, pointed arches, supported on corbels, representing on the left a bearded head, on the right a head shaven on the crown, with curling hair on the sides; in the centre a cantilever, with three lilies in low relief. As the roof had fallen in, the spring of the arches alone remained. The whole was constructed of blocks of stone about three feet long, two feet high, and two feet wide. The promontory upon which all this solid masonry had been erected was washed on three sides by the sea. It rose above it precipitously to a height of about fifty feet. The area was occupied by a miserable population of possibly a hundred squalid, half-clad Arabs, whose huts were built among the ruins, thus preventing any effectual examination of them. It would be difficult to conceive a greater contrast than is presented by these wretched fellahin and their burrowing habitations with the splendour of the edifices and the opulence which must have characterized the former inhabitants. Here and there we see a fragment of a granite column, while, when we reach the brink of the cliff which forms the sea-face of the promontory, we are again surprised at the stupendous scale of these ancient works, and of the sea-wall built out upon a ledge of rocks, exposed to the full fury of the waves, and still standing to a height of forty or fifty feet.