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In the summer the air is cooled by the mountain breezes; in the winter the snow sometimes lies upon the surface of the land. Westward the view is closed by the white peaks of Anti-Lebanon and Hermon; eastward the eye wanders over a green plain covered with the mounds of old towns and villages, and intersected by the clear and rapid streams of the Abana and Pharphar.
With this judgment, in general terms, I agree; but not to its ascendancy, in every respect, over Cairo. True, when you behold Damascus from the Salahiyeh, the last slope of the Anti-Lebanon, it is the realization of all that you have dreamed of Oriental splendor; the world has no picture more dazzling.
After our reception we were invited to the divan, where we drank coffee. Whilst so engaged invisible bands struck up "God Save the Queen"; it was like an electric shock to hear our national hymn in that remote place we who had been so long in the silence of the Anti-Lebanon. We sprang to our feet, and I was so overcome I burst into tears.
As Damascus began to be very hot about this time we moved to our summer quarters at Bludan, about twenty-seven miles across country from Damascus in the Anti-Lebanon. It was a most beautiful spot, right up in the mountains, and comparatively cool.
We had sent our baggage before us, and the men, with an eye to the picturesque which I should not have suspected in Arabs, had pitched our tents under those trees, where the stream poured its snow-cold beakers beside us, and the tent-door looked down on the plain of Baalbec and across to the Anti-Lebanon. The miller and two or three peasants, who were living in this lonely spot, were Christians.
The soil, which slowly climbs upward through a long valley between Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, is cut with deep ravines. The path is very difficult to find; and while we were riding forward at random, looking in all directions for our baggage mules, we started up a beautiful gazelle.
In these mountains are vineyards and groves of figs, olives, and mulberry trees, but most of the ground was dry and brown, as I had seen it in Southern Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor. Beyond the mountains is a beautiful plain, which we entered about noon, and when it was crossed, we came to the Anti-Lebanon Mountains, and reached the old city in the evening.
From thence they proceeded to the Maronite Convent of Mâr Antonius Khoshiah, situated on the brow of an almost perpendicular mountain, where was a printing-press. Nearly all the inhabitants of that part of Lebanon are Maronites, acknowledging allegiance to the Pope. Thence they visited the Cedars of Lebanon; and then crossed the rich plain of Coelo-Syria to Baalbek, at the foot of Anti-Lebanon.
A village called Beit Jenn nestled under the rocks; and below it, a grove of poplar-trees shaded the banks of a rapid stream. We had now fairly crossed the Anti-Lebanon.
The thirst for blood extended to the high lands of Hermon and Anti-Lebanon, and in a short time twenty-five thousand more Christians were massacred and their possessions laid waste. How they hate a Christian in Damascus! and pretty much all over Turkeydom as well. And how they will pay for it when Russia turns her guns upon them again!
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