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The latter, which forms a sort of amphitheatre, circles round and impends over a deep hollow or basin, opening out towards the west, in which rise the chief sources that go to form the romantic stream of the Kadisha. The sides of the basin are bare and rocky, fringed here and there with the rough knolls which mark the deposits of ancient glaciers, the "moraines" of the Lebanon.
On the Phoenician coast was a river Kadisha, "the holy," and the Canaanite maiden saw in the red marl which the river Adonis brought down from the hills the blood of the slaughtered Sun-god Tammuz. The temple of Solomon, built as it was by Phoenician architects and workmen, will give us an idea of what a Canaanitish temple was like.
Lower down near Canobin the valley contracts into a sublime chasm, its rocky walls rising perpendicularly a thousand feet on either side, and in places not leaving room for even a footpath beside the stream that flows along the bottom. The water of the Kadisha is "pure, fresh, cool, and limpid," and makes a paradise along its entire course.
At present the wealth of Lebanon in cedars is not great, but the four hundred which form the grove near the source of the Kadisha, and the many scattered cedar woods in other places, are to be viewed as remnants of one great primeval forest, which originally covered all the upper slopes on the western side, and was composed, if not exclusively, at any rate predominantly, of cedars.
It was a rule of the Mellah that on notice being given of a death in their quarter, the clerk of the synagogue should publish it at the first service thereafter, in order that a body of men, called the Hebra Kadisha of Kabranim, the Holy Society of Buriers, might straightway make arrangements for burial.
"By the Chevra Kadisha beggars and tramps are thus washed and buried when dead, free of expense, by these good, self-sacrificing people, at all times and in all weathers, as a sign that in death all are equal. The people who can afford it leave enough money to pay all their own burial expenses or these are paid for by their relatives.
The Kadisha or "Holy River" has its source in the deep basin already described, round which rise in a semicircle the loftiest peaks of the range, and on the edge of which stand "the Cedars."
These kind folk are called 'the Chevra Kadisha. No doubt because of the heat, there is a strict law that no one who dies in Palestine is allowed to remain unburied long; and it is believed here that the dead continue to suffer until they are entombed. So the custom is to bury within twelve hours every one who dies. The Chevra Kadisha look upon such a deed as a Mitzvoth.
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