_ 144 _ Christians and Maronites who live by cultivation. There are few people in the city in comparison with its size and with what it appears to have been [in the past]. There are dark-skinned Arabs, also Armenian Nestorians, Jacobites, Maronites, Greeks and Jews who are natives of the land. These all speak Arabic and are white people. They have a sanjak placed there by the Turk. Within the city there are two small, well-peopled hills. The people claim that St. Paul was a native of this city. We had travelled here from Aleppo always in a southerly direction, passing through many other places in ruins. From this city, there is a road to the east and south-east across a great desert, twenty- or twenty-five-days’ journey, and every year many caravans go this way to Basra, for it is the most direct, the shortest and the safest. They carry oil and other goods, for in this area there are innumerable olive-trees which produce oil, and olives larger than those of Seville. They always go in December and return in September. The area is very fertile and has great fields of grain, much rearing of livestock and the finest horses in all these parts. Three days’ journey to the south-east of this city lies the famous city of Damascus, at thirty-three-and-a-half
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