In Xanadu by William Dalrymple

foot of the castle rock. We left him there, firing his catapult at the children who were taunting him. Then, despite Nizar's protests about the dirt on his new trousers, we wriggled into the castle through a gap under the postern salient.
    Inside it was dark and smelt of dust and bats' droppings. When our eyes adjusted, we could see stretching out ahead of us long, vaulted corridors buried halfway to the capitals. On either side lay the plain rectangular cells of the fida'i. We picked our way over fallen masonry, and wandered through the castle, silent and respectful, as if in a cathedral. It was a gloomy, eerie place full of sad, empty halls and echoing, rubble-filled cisterns. Preserved by centuries of warm Mediterranean weather it seemed only newly deserted and so doubly melancholy.
    After passing through the length of its buried catacomb-passages, we climbed the winding stairs of a tower and stood on the battlements, looking down over the al-Garb. I tried to link the ruins with the legends I had pored over in libraries in Cambridge. Where was Henry of Champagne standing when the fida’ i leapt over the walls? Where was the library which so impressed Yves the Breton? During a truce he had been sent as an envoy from the French crusader, St Louis, and had been allowed to delve among the scrolls of the Assassins. Among a myriad of spells, cures and incantations he had found the text of an apocryphal sermon addressed by Christ to St Peter, who, the sectaries told him, was an incantation of Abraham, Noah and Abel. When he returned to the crusader camp at Acre, he took with him presents from the Old Man of the Mountain which included a 'crystal elephant very well carved, and an animal they call a giraffe, also in crystal, balls of divers sorts also in crystal, and backgammon and chess boards, and all these were ornamented with amber, and the amber was attached to the crystal by fair filigree of pure gold. When the coffers in which these things were packed were opened it seemed as if the whole chamber were filled with spices so fragrantly did these things smell.'
    After Masyaf, the second castle we visited was a disappointment. We took a bus some fifteen miles down the al-Garb and arrived at the Sheizar soon after midday. The castle was badly mined and the village at its base was an unappealing expanse of mud brick and dung.
    But, with a little imagination, you could just see why the crusaders tried so hard to capture the fort they called ‘La Grande Cesare'. In its day it must have been an impressive sight. It stands on a great hogsback ridge above a bend in the Orontes, with sheer cliffs on two sides, and a steep slope on the third. The slope was glazed with a smooth glacis of neatly fitted stone, the cliffs topped with a curtain wall and on the fourth side, where nature provided no defence, a great fosse hid been sunk into the rock, one hundred feet deep by thirty feet wide. This was crowned with a keep of carefully dressed yellow-ochre stone, its smooth face broken by courses of reused classical columns laid horizontally into the wall.
    We entered the castle through its great Saracenic gateway, and climbed up along the length of the hogsback to the keep, where in the cool of the shade we sat and chatted until the sun had sunk lower. As with Masyaf, Sheizar is more remarkable for its romantic associations than its architecture. Anyone who knows the Marcher castles of Edward the First or the keeps of the Scots Borders can easily be disappointed by the much-vaunted crusader castles, which, with the exception of Krak, Saiyoune and Safita are often quite modest buildings. Where they are exceptional is in the depth of their recorded history, and this is especially so of Sheizar, where the memoirs survive of one of its castellans, the urbane and civilized Usamah ibn-Munquid. Usamah lived a century or so before Polo, but his writings give a unique picture of everyday life in the mediaeval Middle East and, perhaps more than any other