Syria, the land of Lebanon

by Lewis Gaston Leary

The Cedar Mountain. The grove shows as a small, dark patch at the right

The source of the Kadisha River. The rocks in the background mark the edge of the plateau on which are situated the Cedars of Lebanon

Most of the cedars are crowded so closely that their growth has been very irregular. Sometimes two branches from different trees rub against each other until the bark is broken; then the exuding sap cements them together, and in the course of years they grow into each other so that you cannot tell where one tree ends and the other begins. Just over my tent two such Siamese Twins were joined by a common bough a foot in diameter. Near by I found three trees thus united, and another traveler reports having seen no fewer than four connected by a single horizontal branch which apparently drew its sap from all of the parent and foster-parent trunks. Even more remarkable is a cedar which has been burned completely through near the ground, and yet draws so much sap from an adjoining tree that its upper branches continue to bear considerable foliage.

The wood is slightly aromatic, hard, very close-grained, and takes a high polish. It literally never rots. The most striking characteristic of the cedars is their almost incredible vitality. The oldest of all are gnarled and twisted, but they have the rough strength of muscle-bound giants. Each year new cones rise above the broad, green branches, and the balsamic juice flows fresh from every break in the bark. In the words of the Psalmist, they still bring forth fruit in old age, and are full of sap and green. “There is not, and never has been, a rotten cedar. The wood is incorruptible. The imperishable cedar remains untouched by rot or insect.” This is not the extravagant statement of a hurried tourist, but the sober judgment of the late Dr. George E. Post, who was recognized as the world’s greatest authority on Syrian botany. The whole side of one of the largest trees has been torn away by lightning, but the barkless trunk is as hard as ever. The single enemy feared by a full-grown cedar is the thunderbolt. “The voice of Jehovah ... breaketh in pieces the cedars of Lebanon.”[50] One or two trees felled by this power have lain prostrate for a generation; but their wood will still turn the edge of a penknife. Here and there, visitors to the grove have stripped off a bit of bark and inscribed their names on the exposed wood. “Martin, 1769,” “Girandin, 1791”—the edges of the letters are as hard and clear-cut as if they had been carved last season.

It is no wonder that the ancients chose this imperishable timber for their temples. The cedar roof of the sanctuary of Diana of Ephesus is said to have remained unrotted for four hundred years, while the beams of the Temple of Apollo at Utica lasted almost twelve centuries.

Probably the wood is so enduring because it grows so slowly. When you are told that a slender shoot, hardly shoulder-high, is ten or twelve years old, you begin to speculate as to the probable age of the patriarchs of the grove. On a broken branch only thirty inches in diameter I once, with the aid of a magnifying glass, counted 577 rings—577 years. And some of the cedars are forty feet and over in girth! Certainly these must be a thousand years old, probably two thousand. We are tempted to believe that one or two of the most venerable were saplings when the axemen of Hiram came cutting cedar logs for the Temple at Jerusalem. The most rugged and weather-beaten of them all, called the Guardian—surely this hoary giant of the forest has lived through all the ages since Solomon, and from his lofty throne on Lebanon has calmly looked down over Syria and the Great Sea while Jew and Assyrian, Persian and Egyptian, Greek and Roman, Arab and Crusader and Turk, have labored and fought and sinned and died for the possession of this goodly land!

The trees rise on half a dozen little knolls quite near to the edge of the plateau; and within a few minutes’ climb are a number of tall, steeple-like rocks which, through the erosion of the softer stone, have become almost entirely cut off from the main mass of the mountain. One such group, known to American residents of Syria as the “Cathedral Rocks,” is reached by following a knife-edge ridge far out over the valley. There is barely room for a narrow foot-path along the top, and a misstep would mean a fall of many hundred feet; but at its western end the ridge broadens out into a group of slender, tower-like cliffs. When you stand on the farthest of these there is a feeling of spaciousness and isolation as if you were indeed upon the loftiest pinnacle of some gigantic cathedral, though no man-built spire towers to such a dizzy height.

A half-hour of hard and, in places, dangerous climbing down from the cedars brings one to where the Kadisha River bursts from a cave in the rock. Like many another cavern in Lebanon, this is of great depth and has never been thoroughly explored. We contented ourselves with penetrating it a few hundred feet; for it was impossible to avoid slipping into the stream now and then, and the water, fresh from the snow-pockets on the summits above, was only twelve degrees above the freezing-point. The entrance is barely ten feet in diameter, but the cave soon divides into several branches, one of which is beautifully adorned with translucent stalactites and, about seventy yards from the mouth, leads up to a large rock-chamber. The river flows out from the mountain with great rapidity and, just below the source, leaps over a precipice in a white waterfall forty feet high, so delicate and lacelike in its beauty that it is known as the “Bridal Veil.”

Farther down the valley, the monastery of Kanobin hugs the side of a cliff four hundred feet above the river-bed. This is literally “the monastery” (Greek, koinobion), and is one of the oldest in the land. It is said to have been founded over sixteen hundred years ago by the Roman emperor Theodosius the Great, and for centuries it has been the nominal seat of the Maronite patriarchs. In 1829, Asad esh-Shidiak, the first Protestant martyr of Lebanon, was walled up in a near-by cave. This unfortunate man was chained to the rock by his Maronite persecutors and about his neck was fastened one end of a long rope which hung out through an opening in the cave by the roadside. Each Catholic who passed by gave the rope a vicious tug, and Shidiak soon died of torture and starvation.