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We feel a sense of health and harmony diffused through body and mind as we ride over the beautiful terrace which slopes down from Bâniyâs to Tel-el Kâdi. We are glad of the green valonia oaks that spread their shade over us, and of the blossoming hawthorns that scatter their flower-snow on the hillside.
A pair of enormous veterans, a valonia oak and a terebinth, make a broad bower of shade above the tomb of an unknown Mohammedan saint, and there we eat our midday meal, with the murmur of running waters all around us, a clear rivulet singing at our feet, and the chant of innumerable birds filling the vault of foliage above our heads.
It suffered much from the violence of a thunderstorm in 1842, but numerous branches have since sprouted from the old trunk, and it now affords a capacious shade from the noonday heat. It is a variety of the Valonia oak, with delicate, downy, pale-green leaves, much serrated, and contrasts beautifully with the dark green spires of the cypresses behind.
If I had followed the bent given me when I left school, I should now have been a very indifferent clerk in the hide and valonia business. But like you, my dear young friends, I felt that my true vocation was journalism, and I determined to be a journalist. I will tell you exactly how I did it.
It is very densely wooded in most parts, and I have seen large growths of wheat and barley, obviously degenerate now, with currants, figs, valonia, tobacco, vines in rank abundance, and two marble quarries.