Tuesday May {19} 18. [18 May 1909] Off at 5.30, but it was 6 before I left the village with a guide, Reshid and Jusef. We rode through endless oakwood without seeing a soul. My guide said there was a ruined church at one point on the hills. At 8.10 we came to a ruined village called Gernashasur and here we left the path and plunged down a deep valley which brought us at 9.15 to the jibb[?] below the castle of Hatem Tai. I climbed up with my guide. There are two lines of wall, the lower with small round buttresses in it. In the centre of all is the citadel with a very large bir which has been vaulted. In the citadel is a chamber with an apse to the E and a niche in it that looks uncommonly like a chapel. The apse is very finely built. The place has been rebuilt several times and the masonry is of all kinds. I guess it was Byz. and then Yezidi. There is a fragment of Arab inscrip. (Yezidi?) built into one gateway and bits of moulding set face downwards. I noticed too a vault partly of bricks laid slanting against the mur de tete. Lots of small rock cut cisterns for water or corn more likely. So down to the little troglodyte village of Gelieh Kalaki (in Arabic Mugharat Kala'ah) partly Islam and partly Yezid. One of the latter gave us milk and bread and wanted to kill a sheep for us. We left at 10.30 and rode down the valley. Among the oak woods was a Yezidi ziarah. Our Yezidi host kissed a specially big oak which we passed on the way to it and explained that they cd not take the honey out of another oak because it belonged to the shrine. Down the endless bare valley to the plain where the peasants were harvesting. At 12.30 we passed Keui Ilka on the left and at 12.50 came to Kinnik where I lunched under some trees till 1.20. We tried to find someone to shoe Jusef's horse but they said the baitar was dead and there was not a nail in the village. The priest's wife, a nice woman looking like an English parson's wife mutatis mutandis came down and made me welcome. The whole plain strewn over with mound villages and bounded by the Jebel Sinjar [Sinjar, Jabal]. So we went on through some corn and at last I insisted on leaving the path and we climbed up the stony lower slopes seamed with many valleys, Kal'at Jedid standing up ahead in its deep gorge. We met some people who told us that Usedere was still very far off which made me suspect I must be wrong in thinking that it lay at the head of the valley. So up at last into the shadow and under Kal'at Jedid most splendidly placed on crags with a double wall. We stopped to drink and eat an egg (all that was left of our food) at the big deep cistern below it and went off at 5.30. Walked up the gorge through oak woods and came out at 6.40 at the village of Badibbe. I mounted our poor guide and walked on myself through the darkening oakwoods by a shallow solitary valley. Got into Usedere at 7.30 and found the camp.