Presently we come, by way of a broad, natural terrace where the white encampment of the Moslem dead lies gleaming beneath the shade of mighty oaks and terebinths, and past the friendly olive-grove where our own tents are standing, to a deep ravine filled to the brim with luxuriant verdure of trees and vines and ferns. Into this green cleft a little river, dancing and singing, suddenly plunges and disappears, and from beneath the veil of moist and trembling leaves we hear the sound of its wild joy, a fracas of leaping, laughing waters.
The Approach to Bâniyâs.
An old Roman bridge spans the stream on the
brink of its downward leap. Crossing over, we ride through the ruined gateway of the town of Bâniyâs, turn to right and left among its dirty, narrow streets, pass into a leafy lane, and come out in front of a cliff of ruddy limestone, with niches and shrines carved on its face, and a huge, dark cavern gaping in the centre.
A tumbled mass of broken rocks lies below the mouth of the cave. From this slope of débris, sixty or seventy feet long, a line of springs gush forth in singing foam. Under the shadow of trembling poplars and broad-boughed sycamores, amid the lush greenery of wild figs and grapes, bracken and briony and morning-glory, drooping maidenhair and flower-laden styrax, the hundred rills swiftly run together and flow away with one impulse, a full-grown little river.
There is an immemorial charm about the place. Mysteries of grove and fountain, of cave and hilltop, bewitch it with the magic of Nature's life, ever springing and passing, flowering and fading, basking in the open sunlight and hiding in the secret places of the earth. It is such a place as Claude Lorraine
might have imagined and painted as the scene of one of his mythical visions of Arcadia; such a place as antique fancy might have chosen and decked with altars for the worship of unseen dryads and nymphs, oreads and naiads. And so, indeed, it was chosen, and so it was decked.
Here, in all probability, was Baal-Gad, where the Canaanites paid their reverence to the waters that spring from underground. Here, certainly, was Paneas of the Greeks, where the rites of Pan and all the nymphs were celebrated. Here Herod the Great built a marble temple to Augustus the Tolerant, on this terrace of rock above the cave. Here, no doubt, the statue of the Emperor looked down upon a strange confusion of revelries and wild offerings in honour of the unknown powers of Nature.
All these things have withered, crumbled, vanished. There are no more statues, altars, priests, revels and sacrifices at Bâniyâs—only the fragment of an inscription around one of the votive niches carved on the cliff, which records the fact that the niche was made by a certain person who at that time was "Priest of Pan." But the name of this