The coastal range rises like an impregnable barrier parallel to the
shoreline. Its ridge runs from north to south at a height between 1,200
and 1,500 meters, the highest peak rises to 1,562 meters. There are very
few roads across it, suitable for motor vehicles. Right to the last
turning before the pass one wonders just how the road will ever make its
way across. There are many roads which simply becomes dead ends or
dwindle into goat tracks as they reach the top of the ridge. These are
the roads used by hardworking peasants, who often have to rebuild their
stone walls flattened by storms and whose lives are a constant struggle
to wrest a living from an exceedingly unwilling soil.
As this road winds higher and higher it becomes obvious, even to the
passing stranger that the land is becoming poorer and poorer and the
crops less and less. Leaving behind the fertile orchards at the bottom
of the slopes one gradually reaches a landscape where scanty patches of
wheat stand out against the white limestone and the bare garrigue. Far
below there is the sparkling sea, where an oil-tanker is making its way
towards Banias and a cargo-boat is heading into Lattakia.
A Land of Citadels
These were often strategic routes - better suited to the horsemen of
days gone by, the Crusaders or the worriers of Allah, than to the motor
vehicles of today. For those fighting men these mountains were witnesses
of moments of glory and moments of defeat - not of speak of long hours
of waiting and watching for friendly troops or a friendly sail, nor of
the days spent dragging supplies up the mountain side to provision the
strongholds perched like eagle’ eyries on spurs of the Ansariya.
They are still there those citadels, that saw two centuries of bitter
fighting. Some are now no more than shapeless ruins among the thistles:
Mheylbé, Bani Qahtaan, Qsaybeh, Aalayqa, Kahf, Yahmour…others - and they
are among the greatest - still stand out against the Syrian sky,
arrogant even though sometimes mutilate; among them are Qalaat Salah al
Din (known as Saône castle to the Crusaders), Marqab, Safita (Chastel
Blanc) and, proudly isolated, Crac Des Chevaliers. This will certainly
assure Lattakia, important already in the economic development of Syria,
of a significant role in Mediterranean tourism as a whole.
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