Next morning before day, we were up and off for Baalbek, which lies about twenty miles away to the left of the road.
It had rained in the night, and the soil was soft and sticky, making slow work for our horses. The mud clung to their feet and formed huge balls, and we could only advance at a walk. The saddles were unused to us and we to them, and we hurt them a good deal. When we dismounted at Baalbek, every one of the party walked like Falstaff’s recruits, wide between the legs, as though accustomed to the gyves, and some of us were inclined to stand while at meals. We had no time to waste, and after lunch proceeded to do the ruins.
We found them all that fancy and travellers have painted them. They are grander and loftier than anything at Rome or Athens, and the architecture is of a most beautiful and delicate pattern. The temple in its glory must have been something majestic, and I have seen few things among the ruins and edifices of Europe and Asia more striking to the eye or more beautiful in general effect than the court and colonnades of the Temple of the Sun.
But the wonder of Baalbek is in the stones used in its construction. Hewn stones, twelve, fifteen, and twenty feet long, and proportionately wide and high, are frequent in the walls and substructures. You grow weary of saying: “There’s one!” “Look at this!” “and this!” “and this!” You wander down in the underground passages, and the size of the stones, placed as precisely as bricks in a wall of a building of to-day, fairly astounds you; you come out, and look on the wall of the temple, and you find stones twenty-four, twenty-eight, and thirty feet long, and proportionally wide and high. You see stones of this sort away up in the air at the tip of the columns, and you wonder how they got there.
In the western wall are three great stones, one of them sixtyfour feet long, another sixty-three feet eight inches, and another sixty-three feet; they are thirteen feet high and thirteen feet thick. They are twenty feet above ground, properly placed in position, and they were brought from the quarries nearly a mile away.
And in the quarries, is another stone of the same sort sixty-eight feet long, but not quite detached from the rock below.
Don’t drop the subject now but pace off sixty-three feet in your garden or back yard or some other man’s yard or garden; then pace off thirteen feet and then look up thirteen feet on the side of the house and then imagine a hewn stone as large, and after you have done it you will just begin to imagine these stones as we saw them.