That site commands the ancient high road from Egypt.

They could sit up there and take toll to their hearts' content.

The Turks quartered troops in the castle and did the same thing.

But the Turks overdid it, like everything else.
They ruined the trade.

No road there nowadays that amounts to anything." "It looks about ten miles away." "More than eighty." The sun went down behind us while we watched, and here and there the little scattered lights came out among the silent hills in proof that there were humans who thought of them in terms of home.
Venus and Mars shone forth, yellow and red jewels; then the moon, rising like a stage effect, too big, too strongly lighted to seem real, peering inch by inch above the hills and ushering in silence.