mountain (near Medjdel Magdala), of which I had heard much at Tabaria (Tiberias). It is called. the pigeon's castle, on account of the vast quantity of wild pigeons that breed there. . . In the mountain are many natural caverns, which have been united together by passages cut in the rock, and enlarged, in order to render them more commodious for habitation: walls have also been built across the natural openings, so that no person could enter them except through the narrow communicating passages: and wherever the nature of the almost perpendicular cliff permitted it, small bastions were built to defend the entrance of the castle, which has been thus rendered almost impregnable. The perpendicular cliff forms its protection above; and the access from below is by a narrow path, so steep as not to allow of a horse mounting it. In the midst of the caverns several deep cisterns have been hewn. The whole might afford refuge to about six hundred men; but the walls are now much damaged. The place was probably the work of some powerful robber."-BURCKHARDT's Travels in Syria, &c., pp. 330,

331.

Josephus's narrative is as follows:- "Herod hasted away to the robbers that were in the caves, who overran a great part of the country, and did as great mischief to its inhabitants as a war itself could have done. He destroyed a great part of them, till those that remained were scattered beyond the river (Jordan), and Galilee was freed from the terrors it had been under, excepting from those that remained and lay concealed in Now these caves were in the precipices of craggy mountains, and could not be come at from any side, since they had only some winding pathways, very narrow, by which they got up to them; but the rock that lay on their front had beneath it valleys of a vast depth, and of an almost perpendicular declivity; insomuch that the king was doubtful for a long time what to do, by reason of a kind of impossibility there was of

caves.

CAVES USED BY SHEPHERDS.

109

attacking the place. Yet did he at length make use of a contrivance that was subject to the utmost hazard; for he let down the most hardy of his men in chests, and set them at the mouths of the dens. Now these men slew the robbers and their families; and when they made resistance, they sent in fire upon them. And as Herod was desirous of saving some of them, he had a proclamation made that they should come and deliver themselves up to him, but not one of them came willingly to him; and of those that were compelled to come, many preferred death to captivity. And here a certain old man, the father of seven children, whose children, together with their mother, desired him to give them leave to go out, slew them after the following manner: he ordered every one of them to go out, while he stood himself at the cave's mouth, and slew that son of his perpetually who went out. Herod was near enough to see this sight, and his bowels of comFassion were moved at it, and he stretched out his right hand to the old man and besought him to spare his children: yet did he not relent at all upon what he said, but slew his wife as well as his children; and when he had thrown their dead bodies down the precipice, he at last threw himself down after them. By this means Herod subdued these caves, and the robbers that were in them."-WHISTON'S Josephus, iii. 293-295.

Lastly, we may notice the extensive use made of caverns by shepherds, while tending their flocks in remote places. Mr. Stephens mentions having come, on his road to Gaza, to a Bedouin encampment in one of the "most singular and interesting spots" he had ever seen. "We were climbing," he writes, "up the side of a mountain, and saw on a little point on the very summit the figure of an Arab, kneeling in evening prayer. He had finished his devotions, and was sitting on the rock when we approached, and found that he had literally been praying on his house-top, for his habita

tion was in the rock beneath. Like almost every old man one meets in the East, he looked exactly the patriarch of the imagination, and precisely as we would paint Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob. He rose as we approached, and gave us the usual Bedouin invitation to stop and pass the night with him; and leading us a few paces to the brink of the mountain, he showed us in the valley below, the village of his tribe.

"The valley began at the foot of the elevation on which we stood, and lay between ranges of broken and overhanging rocks, a smooth and beautiful table of green, for perhaps a quarter of a mile, and beyond that distance broke off and expanded into an extensive meadow. The whole of this valley, down to the meadow, was filled with flocks of sheep and goats; and, for the first time since I left the banks of the Nile, I saw a herd of cows. But where were the dwellings of the pastors, the tents in which dwelt the shepherds of these flocks and herds? In Egypt I had seen the Arabs living in tombs, and among the ruins of temples; in the desert I had seen them dwelling in tents; but I had never yet seen them making their habitations in the rude crevices of the rocks. Such, however, were their habitations here. The rocks in many places were overhanging; in others there were chasms or fissures; and wherever there was anything that could afford a partial protection from the weather on one side, a low, rough, circular wall of stone was built in front of it, and formed the abode of a large family. Within the small enclosure in front, the women were sitting winnowing or grinding grain, or rather pounding and rubbing it between two stones, in the same primitive manner practised of old, in the days of the patriarchs. We descended and pitched our tents in the middle of the valley. The habitations in the crevices of the rock, bad as they would be considered anywhere else, I found much more comfortable than most of the huts of the Egyptians on the banks of the Nile,

SHEPHERDS IN CAVES.

111

or the rude tents of the Bedouins. It was not sheer poverty that drove these shepherds to take shelter in the rocks; for they were a tribe more than three hundred strong, and had flocks and herds such as are seldom seen among the Bedouins; and they were far better clad, and had the appearance of being better fed than my companions."-STEPHEN's Incidents of Travel, ii. 127-132.

sons,

"Anab* is still inhabited by about one hundred per(who) all live in grottoes or caves excavated in the rock. (They) are undoubtedly of very high antiquity. . . . Their present possessors. are chiefly shepherds, whose flocks browse on the steep sides of the hills near them, and who, in the severe nights of winter, take shelter in the caves with their attendants. Some of the inhabitants of the caves are, however, cultivators of the earth, and till and plant such detached plots and patches of the soil among the least steep parts of the ascent, as may be most favourable for the fruits or grain. The grottoes themselves are all hewn out by the hand of man, and are not natural caverns; but from their great antiquity, and the manner in which they were originally executed, they had a very rude appearNevertheless, the persons who occupy them fortunately deem them far superior to buildings of masonry, and consider themselves better off than those who live in tents or houses, so that they envy not the dwellers in camps or cities. They are certainly more durable and less likely to need repair than either; and, with the exception of a chimney, or some aperture to give an outlet to the smoke (a defect existing in all the buildings of these parts), they are very comfortable retreats, being dryer and more completely sheltered from wind and rain than either house or tent, besides being warmer in winter and cooler in summer than any other kind of dwelling-place that could be adopted."-BUCKINGHAM'S Arab Tribes, pp. 61-63.

ance.

* A city east of Jordan.

112

DWELLINGS IN ROCK TOMBS.

Captains Irby and Mangles, when travelling round the Dead Sea, found “ many artificial caves in a large range of perpendicular cliff. . . . Some of these were in the form of regular stables, in which feeding-troughs still remain, sufficient for thirty or forty horses, with holes in the live rock for the head-fastenings. Some of the caves are chambers and small sleeping apartments, probably for servants and attendants. There are two rows of these chambers: the upper one has a sort of projecting balcony across the front of the chambers. There is one large hall finely proportioned, with some Hebrew characters inscribed over the doorway; the whole is approached by a sort of causeway."-Travels, pp. 473, 474.

"The caverns in the country towards Damascus (were) always dwellings, (and) are very capacious, affording shelter to both the inhabitants and their flocks." -ROBINSON'S Researches, ii. 141, note.

"As the sun rose, we heard the bleating of flocks, and the crowing of cocks, as if from a village. On inquiring, we were told that there was none; but a company of peasants were living there in caves, pasturing their flocks. In summer, it was said, a large portion of the peasantry leave their villages, and dwell in caves or ruins, in order to be nearer to their flocks and fields." -ROBINSON'S Researches, i. 212.

We shall have hereafter to notice, that artificial or natural caves were applied to the purposes of burial. After they had been so applied they were still used as dwelling-places. We have an instance of this in the demoniac whom our Lord healed on the eastern shore of the lake of Galilee :-"When He was come out of the ship, immediately there met Him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit, who had his dwelling among the tombs; . . . And always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying and cutting himself with stones" (Mark v. 2, 3, 5). The same places were in Isaiah's time the resort of those who