It is a clean and compact town of about 25,000 inhabitants, of whom 7000 are Greek Christians, 3000 Jacobites, and the rest Mohammedans.

The houses are built of sun-dried bricks and black basaltic rock, and the streets are beautifully paved with small square blocks of the same rock, giving it a neat and clean appearance.

There are few windows on the street; the houses are one story high, with diminutive doors, not more than four feet high; and the low dull walls stretching along the streets, give the city a dismal and monotonous appearance.

The reason of building the doors so _low_, is to prevent the quartering of Turkish government horsemen on their families, as well as to prevent the Bedawin Arabs from plundering them.

On the southwest corner of the city stands an ancient castle in ruins, built on an artificial mound of earth of colossal size, which was once faced with square blocks of black trap rock, but this facing has been all stripped off to build the modern city.
The people are simple and country-like in dress and manners, and the most of them have a cow-yard within the courts of their houses, thus combining the pastoral with the citizen life.