The Land of Gilead Author:Laurence Oliphant Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. Am Fit—An Ansariyeh Village—The Sheik's House—His Reticence—Origin of the Ansariyeh—The Founder of the Sect—Their Religious Tenets—Their Social Di... more »visions—Marriage and Other Ceremonies—Journey to Kuneitereh —A Circassian Colony—Kuneitereh—Mcdjliss at the Caimakam's—Present Condition and Prospects of the Circassian Colonists. As far as Banias we had required no guide. Captain Phibbs was so intimately acquainted with the country, that we had not only found our way here without difficulty, but had even made the rash experiment of a short cut successfully. Now, however, we were getting into country rarely visited by any traveler, in regard to which there were the usual exaggerated stories of marauding Bedouins, of the necessity of an escort, and so forth. Fortunately, we had no dragoman to invent impossible dangers for the purpose of sharing the blackmail afterward with the Arab chief who is put up to demanding it—nor had we a long caravan of mules laden with tents and baggage to tempt the needy nomad; but we jogged humbly and unostentatiously behind a guide we picked up at Banias, who said he knew the way to Kuneitereh, followed by Hanna, our trusty cook, mounted on a bright little Arab, and the two muleteers riding their lightly loaded animals. We passed out of Banias by its southern gate—a massive and very handsome structure, on which is an Arabic inscription, though the walls are in fact very ancient—and crossed the brook of the Wady Za'areh by a stone bridge, which is also partly ancient, and in the walls of which were several granite columns, and followed a path a little to the east of south, which gradually began to ascend the range which forms the eastern side of the Jordan valley. We here left the territory of Dan and entered that of the half-tribe of Mana...« less