Rapidly we run down the eastern, or landward, counterslope of the Lebanon, remembering the anti-Jacobin couplet:
And down thy slopes romantic Ashdown glides
The Derby dilly carrying six insides.
Before its lowest folds we find the fifth station, Shtóra; here, as it is now 10 a.m., we breakfast. We at once realise what will be the bill of fare in the interior. Bread? perhaps. Potatoes? possibly. Beef or veal? impossible. Pig? ridiculous. Little, in fact, but lean kid and lamb, mutton, and fowls whose breast-bones pierce their skins. Wine? yes—dear and bad.
Beer or porter, seltzer or soda? decidedly no. In the winter game is to be had, woodcock and wild duck, hares and gazelles; but the diet is held to be heating and bilious. Vegetables, however, are plentiful, and, during the season, fruit is abundant, with the usual drawback in half-civilised lands: wall fruit is all but unknown, and, with the exception of the excellent grapes and the unwholesome apricots, each kind lasts only a few days.
After breakfast we spin by a straight road—such as old Normandy knew and modern Canada still knows—the breadth of the valley. It is laid out in little fields, copiously irrigated. The little villages which stud the plain are, like those of Egypt, not of Syria, built on mounds, and black with clay plastered over the wicker-work. Every mile or so has some classical ruin: on our right a Báal temple; to our left Chalcis ad Belum; whilst six hours of slow riding northwards, or up the valley, place you at immortal Báalbak, which the Greeks still call Heliopolis.
A rising plane and a bend to the right land us at the first of the Anti-Libanus. Instead of ascending and descending this range, as we did with the Lebanon prism, we thread a ravine called by the Druzes the Valley of Silk, from their favourite article of plunder. An easy up-slope leads to Sahlat Judaydah, the dwarf plateau about 3,600 feet high, where the watershed changes from west to east; farther on to the wild gorge Wady el Karn (“of the Thorn”), so called from its rich ribbings and the wreathing and winding of the
bed. We find a stiff climb or a long zigzag at the Akabat el Tin (the Steep of Lime).
The descent of the steep ends with the Daurat el Billau (Zigzag of the Camel Thorn), and thence we fall into the Sahrat el Dimas, so called from a village which may have borrowed a name from the penitent thief. This Sahara has been described with prodigious exaggeration in order to set off by contrast the charms of the so-termed “sublime Gorge of Abana,” to which it leads. Measuring some ten kilometres, it is undoubtedly a rough bit of ground, dry as dust in the summer, and in winter swept by raving winds and piled with sleet and snow. At its eastern end the Sahara at once dips into a deep, lateral gorge, which feeds, after rains, the Barada Valley, and here we remark that curious contrast of intense fertility with utter, hopeless barrenness which characterises inner Spain. Life is in that thick line of the darkest and densest evergreen, which, smiling under the fierce and fiery sun-glare, threads the side of the valley, in the wholesome perfume of the wild plants, and in the gush and murmur of waters making endless music. Death is represented by the dull grey formation standing up in tombstones, by the sterile yellow lime-rock, and by the chalk, blinding white; and the proportion of good to bad is as one to twenty. This verdure is, the Arabs say, a cooling to the eye of the beholder; it is like the aspect of the celadon-coloured sea that beats upon the torrid West African shores. With the author of that charming book “Eothen,” “you float
along (for the delight is as the delight of bathing) through green, wavy fields and down into the cool verdure of groves and gardens, and you quench hot eyes in shade as though in deep, rushing waters.”