LEAVING the Cedars, and descending to the base of the mountain where the tents were left, we start across the beautiful valley lying between the long mountain of Lebanon and anti-Lebanon. Before reaching the valley proper we are compelled to cross some rough mountain spurs and to go through some narrow mountain passes. It so happens that we meet a train of heavily laden camels. The fanatical and blood-thirsty Arabs managing the camels stop their caravan and obstinately refuse to give any part of the pass. Our body-guards come up. A quarrel ensues. A war of words leads to blows, and we have, enacted before our own eyes, a second “Battle of the Giants.” It looks to Johnson like the first one. The two parties, consisting of about forty Arabs, curse, threaten, close on each other, clinch, fight like fiends, grapple like giants. They fall to the earth in each other’s embrace, roll over, first one on top and then the other. They bite, kick and scratch each other. Together they fall and together they rise again—one bites the dust and then another. Javelins are used. Stones fly, sabres flash—gods! how they fight! Heads are mashed and limbs are broken. Hair flies and blood flows. The horses scare, the women scream and Johnson looks as if he wants to say:

“Lay on, MacDuff,

And damned be he who first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’”

At last the enemy is repulsed and victory perches upon our banner. The dust and din of battle are no more. We are relieved; for danger was imminent and suspense correspondingly great. It is the greatest wonder, and also the greatest blessing imaginable, that no one was killed. If one of the natives had been killed, I am sure the whole community would have been aroused, and would have poured out their indignation and wrath upon our Christian heads—”Christian dogs,” they call us. I see from the London Times that only a few weeks ago twenty-four Christians were killed in a fray with the Arabs, not far from this place. We would not willingly harm a hair of their heads. All we wanted was room to pass, and having secured that we continue our journey.

The mountain gap lets us once more into the valley which is, as before stated, fifteen to eighteen miles wide and some sixty miles long. In this valley, and not far from here, is Riblah, where Nebuchadnezzar had his headquarters during the campaign against Jerusalem. When the holy city fell, Zedekiah, King of Judea, fled to Jericho where he was captured, thence he was brought to Riblah. Here, after witnessing the murder of his sons, poor Zedekiah was subjected to the painful ordeal of having his eyes put out. To this place, also, Pharaoh Necho, after his brilliant victory over the Babylonians, summoned Jehoahaz from Jerusalem.

The valley is now used as pastures and farming lands; wheat, oats and grapes being the principal productions. The river Leontes flows through the plain, and the fields are watered mostly by irrigation. Yet these people are only playing with agriculture. The valley is rich and fertile, and would abundantly reward honest labor. But honest labor is unknown in Syria. These trifling people anger the soil with their rude implements of agriculture, and the soil answers with a crop of thorns and thistles. She thrusts out her claws and thus frights off the lean, lazy, leisure-loving Bedouin. The people sow the seeds of idleness and reap the legitimate fruits—hunger, want and starvation. I never before knew what squalid poverty meant. But if it is to go half naked, and almost the other half, too; if it is for human beings to live in the same rock-pens with cows, goats and asses, and that, too, without a fireplace, without chairs, tables or bedsteads; if it is to live on half rations of “husks and hominy,”—if this is squalid poverty, I have seen it and know what it means. Each family seems to be blest with a dozen or fifteen heirs—heirs of filth and poverty! I am reminded of the old adage, “poor people for children and negroes for dogs.” These people and their ancestry have inhabited this country only 4,000 years, and yet within that short time they have managed to accumulate a mass of filth and ignorance that is truly astonishing.

We are now encamped in the citadel of Baalbek. This place has much interest for the traveler and the historian, because of its once mighty temples. The temples were three in number. They were all built on the same stupendous substructions. The rock foundations go deep into the ground, and are traversed by great subterranean passages which look like railroad tunnels through mountains of granite. The Temple of the Sun was three hundred feet long, one hundred and sixty feet wide, and was surrounded by fifty-four columns, six of which are standing at present. These six are enough for twelve months’ study. They are solid marble, eight feet in diameter, and together with the entablature which joins them at the top, ninety feet high! How shapely, how graceful, how towering and sublime! The carving on the entablature is exquisite. It looks like stucco work. The other columns are fallen and broken, but these six look as if they were put up only yesterday.

The Great Temple is better preserved; its potent walls, and twenty-three of its Corinthian columns, still stand. There is no wood about the building. Even its vaulted roof, one hundred feet above you, is marble. The under side of this marble roof is beautifully chiseled. As one views it with the natural eye, it look like delicate lace work; but by the aid of field glasses one can trace the designs of the artist, and see that “there is method in his madness.” One can see men, animals, leaves, flowers and fruits delicately carved in the high lifted stone. One sees, or fancies he sees, oaks and acorns, moons and mares, men, mice and monkeys, doves, dogs and donkeys, bulls, boars and bears, pigs, ‘possums and puppies, boys and bonnets, ladies and lizards, all beautifully carved and sweetly blended one with the other. “‘Tis a vision, ‘tis an anthem sung in stone, a poem writ in marble.”

But probably the thing that most impresses one about the ruins of Baalbek is the enormous size of the stones used in its buildings. I have never seen or read of such stones as were used in building these temples. Many of them are as large as one of our ordinary freight cars. Three of these stones, lying end to end in the walls of the temple, measure two hundred and ten feet. I go to the quarry, half a mile away, from which these colossal stones were taken. There I find a companion stone to those in the buildings. It is fourteen feet high, seventeen feet broad and seventy-one feet long. Who ever heard of such stones being handled! Two six mule teams might be driven side by side on the stone, and there would be room for a foot path on either side the wagons. No pigmies they—those builders of Baalbek. A race of giants or of gods must have handled these stones! No one knows when, how, or by whom these temples were built. We know this, however, they were built, not for an age, but for all time.