“Far out in the desert, in the midst of a rolling plain, beside the dry bed of an ancient stream, there is a deserted city. The plain about it is not a waste of sand, its surface is compoased of dry and exhausted soil, overgrown with grey lichen, thinly sprinkled with parched desert plants, and strewn with rounded bits of black basalt, from the size of an egg to the size of a man's head, which are no longer black, as they were when the peasant's plough-share turned them over from time to time; for the desert mosses have covered them with a lace-work of white and grey, so disguising the real nature as to have led one traveler, at least, to mistake the plain for a bed of limestone. The walls of the ancient deserted city, its half ruined gates, the towers and arches of its churches, the two and three-story walls of its mansions, all of basalt, rise black and forbidding from the grey of the plain. Many of the buildings have fallen in ruins, but many others preserve their ancient form in such wonderful completeness, that, to the traveler approaching them from across the plain, or viewing them with the aid of a field glass from the nearest crests of the Djebel Haur'n, the deserted ruin appears like a living city, all of black, rising from a grey-white sea”
(H. C. Butler, PES II, 1913: 149-50).