The walls of the mosque are covered with a coat of fine plaster, upon which were many Cufic inscriptions in bas-relief, running all round the wall, which was embellished also by numerous elegant Arabesque ornaments; a few traces of these, as well as of the inscriptions, still remain. The interior court-yard of the mosque is covered with the ruins of the roof, and with fragments of columns, among which I observed a broken shaft of an octagonal pillar, two feet in diameter; there are also several stones with Cufic inscriptions upon them.
Passing from the great mosque, southwards, we came to the principal ruin of Boszra, the remains of a temple, situated on the side of a long street, which runs across the whole town, and terminates at the western gate. Of this temple nothing remains but the back wall, with two pilasters, and a column, joined by its entablature to the main wall; they are all of the Corinthian order, and both capitals and architraves are richly adorned with sculpture. In the wall of the temple are three rows of niches, one over the other. Behind this is another wall, half ruined. In front of the temple, but
[p.230]standing in an oblique direction towards it, are four large Corinthian Columns, equalling in beauty of execution the finest of those at Baalbec or Palmyra (those in the temple of the Sun at the latter place excepted): they are quite perfect, are six spans in diameter, and somewhat more than forty-five feet in height; they are composed of many pieces of different sizes, the smallest being towards the top, and they do not appear to have been united by an entablature. They are not at equal distances, the space between the two middle ones being greater than the two other intervals. About thirty paces distant stands another column, of smaller dimensions, and of more elaborate but less elegant execution. I endeavoured in vain to trace the plan of the edifice to which these columns belonged, for they correspond in no way with the neighbouring temple; it appeared that the main building had been destroyed, and its site built upon; nothing whatever of it remaining but these columns, the immediate vicinity of which is covered with the ruins of private houses. These four large columns, and those of Kanouat, are the finest remains of antiquity in the Haouran. Upon the base of the pilaster in the back wall of the temple is the following inscription, in handsome characters: