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After this, between Gabala and Cape Posideium there is considerable irregularity, the whole tract being mountainous, and spurs from Bargylus and Casius running down into the sea and forming a succession of headlands, of which Cape Posideium is the most remarkable.
Mount Casius is, strictly speaking, the termination of a spur from Bargylus; but it has so marked and peculiar a character that it seems entitled to separate description. Rising up abruptly from the Mediterranean to the height of 5,318 feet, it dominates the entire region in its vicinity, and from the sea forms a landmark that is extraordinarily conspicuous.
Purple seems somewhat out of place in the enumeration; but the Syrians may have gathered the murex on their seaboard between Mt. Casius and the Gulf of Issus, and have sold what they collected in the Phoenician market. The precious stones which Ezekiel assigns to them are difficult of identification, but may have been furnished by Casius, Bargylus, or Amanus.
The eyes which first looked down from the ridge of Bargylus or Lebanon upon the well-watered, well-wooded, and evidently fertile tract between the mountain summits and the sea, if they took no note of its marvellous and almost unequalled beauty, must at any rate have seen that here was one of earth's most productive gardens emphatically a "good land," that might well content whosoever should be so fortunate as to possess it.
Myrtle and rhododendron grow luxuriantly on the flanks of Bargylus, and are more plentiful than any other shrubs in that region. Eastern Lebanon has abundant scrub of juniper and barberry; while on the western slopes their place is taken by the bramble, the myrtle, and the clematis.
Bargylus is not a chain comparable to Lebanon, but still it is a romantic and picturesque region. The lower spurs towards the west are clothed with olive grounds and vineyards, or covered with myrtles and rhododendrons; between them are broad open valleys, productive of tobacco and corn.
Travellers in Phoenicia do not often mention the caper plant, but it was seen by Canon Tristram hanging from the fissures of the rock, in the cleft of the Litany, amid myrtle and bay and clematis. The small-leaved holly was noticed by Mr. Walpole on the western flank of Bargylus. The prickly pear is not a native of Asia, but has been introduced from the New World.
Among the places thus treated between the years B.C. 740 and B.C. 738, we find the Phoenician cities of Zimirra, or Simyra, and Arqa, or Arka. Zimirra was in the plain between the sea and Mount Bargylus, not very far from the island of Aradus, whereof it was a dependency.
The fig is also, almost certainly, a native; it grows plentifully, not only in the orchards about towns, but on the flanks of Lebanon, on Bargylus, and in the northern Phoenician plain.
The conformation of the land, so broken up into isolated regions by strong spurs from Lebanon and Bargylus, lent additional support to the separatist spirit, and the absence in the early times of any pressure of danger from without permitted its free indulgence without entailing any serious penalty.
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