Syria, the land of Lebanon

by Lewis Gaston Leary

The valley of the Holy River is full of old hermits’ caves; but these are now untenanted, and we found no monks even at the great convent. In a parallel valley, however, is a monastery which is still crowded and busy. Deir Keshaya boasts a printing-press, a good library and a staff of a hundred monks. This religious retreat has the most secluded and beautiful situation imaginable. It lies in a very narrow cañon hemmed in by sheer rocks. Yet, though surrounded by nature in its most grand and forbidding aspects, the narrow strip of cultivated land along the river bank is rich with verdure, a veritable Garden of the Lord.

The monastery not only spreads along the face of the cliff, but penetrates far into the mountain. What you see of it from without is hardly more than the façade of a huge, rambling structure whose principal part consists of natural caves and chambers rudely cut in the native rock. Through a little wooden door we were admitted to the largest cavern, where we saw, hanging from staples set securely into its walls, a number of great, cruel chains. People who are possessed of devils are fastened here by the neck and ankles, and during the night an angel comes and drives away the demon. The treatment has never been known to fail; for if the morning finds the sufferer still uncured, that merely shows that he did not have a devil after all, but was just an ordinary lunatic for whom the monastery did not promise relief.

Back of the cedars, there are also many fascinating excursions. The ranges of Syria being geologically “old” mountains which are worn and rounded, you can, by taking a somewhat circuitous route, reach almost any summit on horseback, but it is much more fun to go straight up the steepest slopes on foot. About 2,500 feet above the grove is a line of gently rolling plateaus whose stones have been broken and smoothed by millenniums of snow and ice. You see acre after acre entirely covered with clean, flat fragments which measure from one to five inches in length. Viewed from a distance, their appearance is exactly like that of the soft surface of a wheat-field. The only vegetable life consists of tiny bunches of a low, hardy plant with wooly gray-green leaves. We saw one little butterfly fluttering about lonesomely in the vast desolation.

Sheltered from sun and wind just under the highest ridges are snow-pockets—great, funnel-shaped depressions which during the hottest summer send down their moisture through the mountain mass to the cave-born rivers of western Syria. One who has not been there would never suspect how cold it can be in mid-summer on these higher slopes of Lebanon. The direct rays of the sun are, of course, very hot, and the wise traveler protects his head by a pith helmet. Yet the gloomy gorges are always chilly, the wind is biting, and the nights are positively cold. When tenting among the cedars, I slept regularly under heavy blankets, and once or twice reached down in the middle of the night and pulled over me the rug which lay beside my cot. The first time we climbed the mountain back of our camp, the wind was so cold and penetrating that we could remain only a few minutes on the summit, though we wore the heaviest of sweaters and had handkerchiefs tied over our faces.

At another ascent, however, we were more fortunate, for we found only a slight breeze blowing on the summit. The “Back of the Stick,” as the natives call this highest ridge of Lebanon, affords a view over the top of all Syria. Northward stretches the long succession of rounded summits, down to the left of which can be seen the white houses of the seaport of Tripoli. To the south are other lofty peaks, though all are lower than ours. Jebel Sunnin, which seems so mighty when viewed from the harbor of Beirut, now lies far below us. Mount Hermon rises still majestic seventy miles away, yet even the topmost peak of great Hermon is not so high as the spot on which we stand. To the east, across the long, broad valley of the Bikaʿ, rises the parallel range of Anti-Lebanon. Westward the magnificent amphitheater which we have come to think of as peculiarly our own opens out to where the Mediterranean, like a sheet of beaten gold, seems to slope far up to the azure sky.

Yet, after a while, we turned from this wonderful panorama to indulge in childish play. With a crowbar brought for the purpose, we dislodged large rocks from the summit and sent them spinning down the eastern side of the mountain. Some of them must have weighed several tons, and they tumbled down the slope with tremendous momentum. The first thousand feet they almost took at a bound; then, reaching a more gentle decline, they would spin along on their edges. Now they would strike some inequality and, leaping a hundred yards, land amid a cloud of scattering stones; now they would burst in mid-air from centrifugal force, with a noise like a cannon shot; now some very large stone, surviving the perils of the descent, would arrive at the base of our peak and, on the apparently level plateau below, would very slowly roll and roll and roll as if it possessed some motive power of its own. Several days later we met a wandering shepherd who told us that, while dozing beneath the shade of a cliff far down the mountainside, he had been suddenly awakened by a terrific cannonading and had sat there for hours in trembling wonderment at the demoniac forces which were tumbling Mount Lebanon down over his head.

One evening we strolled out to the edge of our plateau and saw the whole countryside a-twinkle with lights. It was the anniversary of the Finding of the True Cross. When St. Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, discovered the precious relic sixteen hundred years ago, beacons prepared in anticipation of the success of the search were lighted and the glad news was thus flashed from Jerusalem to the emperor at Constantinople. In commemoration of that joyous event, annual signal fires still burn along the land of Lebanon. Far down in black gorges we saw the lights flash out. North and south of us, unseen villages on the hillsides kindled their beacons. Higher up, in wild pine forests, the lonely charcoal-burners made their camp-fires blaze brighter; and even on the bare, bleak summits there shone here and there tiny gleams of light. Amid the solemn quiet of our mountain solitude, we watched the beacons flash out around us and below us and above, until all Lebanon seemed starred with the bright memorials of the Cross which this old, old land, through long centuries of oppression and ignorance and bigotry, has never quite forgot.

We spent a month in the cedar grove, and never had a dull day. At dawn we could look out of the tent to where the green branches framed a charming bit of blue, distant sea. After breakfast the studious man would climb up into his favorite fork and ensconce himself there with pen and ink and paper and books and cushions. The adventurous man would scramble up to the topmost bough of some lofty tree and stretch out on its soft twigs for a sun-bath. The lazy man would curl up against a comfortable root, to smoke and dream away the morning hours. Sketching and photographing and mountain climbs were interspersed with unsuccessful hunting expeditions and aimless conversations with Maronite priests who had come up to visit their little rustic chapel in the grove. After supper came the camp-fire, with its cozy sparkle and its friendly confidences and the black background of the forest all around. Then, by eight o’clock at the latest, we snuggled into our blankets and, in the crisp, balsam-scented air, slept the clock around. Sometimes the full moon shone so brightly that the whole mountain would take on a soft silver glow, against which colors could be distinguished almost as well as by day. Now and then there would be a cold, foggy morning; but the trees kept out the mists and, although a solid wall of white surrounded us, within the grove it was clear and dry and homelike.

The shelter, the support, the background, the inspiration of all the camp life, were the great, solemn trees. After a while you come to love them, or rather to reverence them. They are so large, so old; they have such marked individuality. The cedars are regal rather than beautiful. Rough and knotted and few in number, at first sight they are a little disappointing; but, like the mountains around them, they become more impressive day by day. These thousand-year-old trees seem to stand aloof from the hurry and bustle of the twentieth century, as though they were absorbed in thoughts of earlier, and perhaps wiser, days. After you have lived for a time beneath their shade, their solemn magnificence begins to quiet your spirit; and when the glorious moonlight floods the mountain and casts black shadows down the deep gorges that drop away to the distant sea, it is easy to behold in the witching light the picture that these ancient trees saw in the long ago. Dark groves of cedars nestle once more in the valleys and sweep over the mountaintops in great waves of green; a stronger peasantry speaks a different tongue in the fields below that are brighter and the orchards that are heavier with fruit; and from the depths of the moon-painted forest there comes the ring of ten thousand axes that are hewing down the choicest trunks for the Temple of the Lord.

Then the vision fades, and with a sense of personal loss and a regret that is almost anger, you look out again from under the dark branches of the little grove to the bleak, bare mountainside, and the wind in the topmost boughs seems to sing the lament of Zechariah—