KEFR LATA.
126
Rieha, on the S. side of a narrow valley watered by a rivulet; it
contains forty or fifty houses, all well built of square stones,
which have been taken from the buildings of a town of the lower
empire, which occupied the same site. The remains deserve
notice, on account of the vast quantity of stone coffins and sepulchres. ¬
The mountain is a barren calcareous rock, of no great
hardness. In some places are a few spots of arable ground, where
the inhabitants of the village grow barley and Dhourra. On the
side of the rivulet are some fruit trees. We were occupied the
whole morning in visiting the neighbourhood of the village, which
must have been anciently the burying place of all the great families ¬
of this district; the number of tombs being too considerable ¬
for so small a town as Kefr Lata appears to have been; no such
sepulchres, or at least very few, are met with among the ruins
of the large cities which we saw afterwards in the same mountain.
Beginning on the west side of the village, Icounted sixteen coffins
and seven caves ; the coffins are all excavated in the rock; the
largest are nine feet long, and three feet and a half in breadth ; the
smaller seven feet long, and three feet broad ; their depth is generally ¬
about five feet. In the greater part of them there is on one
side a curved recess, cut in the rock, about four feet in length, and
two feet in breadth. All these coffins had originally stone lids of
a single block of stone, exactly covering the aperture of the
coffin. Only a small proportion of these now remain entire, but
there are some quite uninjured. I saw only two or three in which
a sculptured frieze or cornice was carried along the whole length of
the cover; the generality have only a fewornaments
on the two ends; they are all of
the annexed shape.
The apertures of the coffins are invariably even with the surface ¬
of the ground, and the lids only are seen from without, as
if lying upon the surface.
