CEDARS OF LEBANON.

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obtained Maronites as guides. They were then about twenty-eight in number, thought to be planted by Solomon, and in a valley on the mountains so covered with snow as only to be accessible in the summer. From that time to the present the trees have been gradually decreasing in number, until scarcely a dozen remain. Many of them are furrowed with lightning, which seems to strike them every year. While there are other groves discovered throughout the range of Lebanon, these trees are generally considered the ancient cedars. And here are annual festivals, and here an altar and a little chapel, and around all in this grove solemn associations cluster; and, when these relics of past centuries shall fall, none others will ever be able to excite so much veneration as has been associated with them, even though an equal antiquity should be ascribed to them.*

"At a distance they look very much like wide-spreading conical oaks. The measurements of the largest trunks are eight and nine feet in diameter, twenty-four feet in circumference; and another, with a sort of triple body and of a triangular figure, measured twelve feet on each side." Pococke's Description of the East. La Roque, who visited them in 1722, counted twenty-two large cedars, the largest with a trunk nineteen feet in circumference, and a head of one hundred and twenty feet in circumference. The celebrated temple of Diana at Ephesus-which was accounted one of the seven wonders of the world, and which was two hundred and twenty years in building destroyed by fire on the night of the birth of Alexander the Great, was constructed principally of cedar. Pliny speaks of a temple of Apollo at Utica, in Africa, in which was found cedar timber that, though nearly two thousand years old, was perfectly sound. Its oil, or the resin of the cedar, preserved the papyrus, according to Vitruvius, and so it does the mummies (Pliny). As the annual alternations or rings in the wood of the cedar are very distinct, cross-sections of this wood may yet be used successfully in determining not only the age of the tree, but the comparative temperatures of the winters. There is a remarkable uniformity and relation between the temperature of winters and the character of these cyclical alternations of trees, as seen under a microscope after saturation; and, if this relation, which seems to exist in several trees-as in the chestnut, the ash, and the oak-can be eventually developed in the cedar, meteorological facts of great interest may yet be elicited from the rings of ancient cedars in the mountains of Lebanon. In 1832, M. Bove, ex-Director of Agriculture of Ibrahim Pasha at Cairo, in going from

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GEOLOGICAL REMAINS.

The last link in the range of Lebanon (the Jebel Akkar) may be noted as containing the highest point of the whole range. That point in its southern portion runs up to the height of ten thousand five hundred feet,-which is probably fifteen hundred feet higher than Mount Hermon. These eight unequal links, as far as we know at present, form the divisions of the long range of Mount Lebanon, which, commencing on the north and running south-southwest, terminates nearly east of Sidon. The corresponding range of Anti-Lebanon runs from the same latitude east of Sidon, and seems to bend over more toward the east, and forms with its branches the western boundary of the plain of Damascus. It is not so thickly settled as Lebanon, nor is it so separable into distinct links as the western range.

From the specimens collected by myself and othersall of which have been found in this western range aloneI am convinced that a most interesting and important geological and mineralogical cabinet could be formed from this range alone. Some fragments have given me reason to think that ammonites may yet be found of several feet diameter. I have in my possession a shell (ostrea) which I obtained at Beirut, and which was taken near the summitridges of the Lebanon, which, though fossil, exhibits in part all the rich and pearly hue of recent shells.*

In the fall of 1854, a Turkish gentleman hired some Arabs to dig a foundation for a villa near Sidon. One of

Jakhlehe to Deir el Kamr, passed through a valley, and on the right was a mountain with some thousands of cedars on its summit. "These," he says, are from three to sixteen feet in circumference, and in height exceeding fifty feet.' The cedar of Lebanon has also been lately discovered on Mount Atlas, and cones, &c. sent thence by the consul at Tangier, and also from Morocco. It is an error to suppose that there are no young cedars, or that the accumulation of cones and leaves prevents future growth, as is asserted in Loudon's work, above quoted. The author has in his possession two plants, each seven inches in height, which with thousands were growing under the shadow of the old cedars in June 1858.

*There are forty varieties of fossil shells which have been first seen in Syria, and perhaps are unknown elsewhere.

them struck against an earthen vessel buried among the ruins; and, to the amazement of the Arabs, out rolled about fifteen hundred pieces of gold. They were coins of the time of Alexander and of Philip, and probably had been buried for safe-keeping, but the owner-from exile or sudden death -was never able to make use of it or to reveal its hidingplace. The Arabs distributed the prize among themselves; but the governor of the pashalic of which Sidon is a city obtained news of the discovery and possession of the princely treasure itself, which he soon melted down, and, so far as I have known, the antique specimens, so much more precious for their history than for their intrinsic value, were lost except a single specimen.

M

CHAPTER VII.

SAREPTA AND THE COUNTRY BETWEEN SIDON AND TYRE

BEFORE We commenced our wanderings, we informed Hanna that it was our intention to leave for Tyre to-day; but on our return we found our baggage where we had left it, and some Arabs cosily enjoying themselves in the midst. Our dragoman is shrewd; and we begin to suspect that a strong temptation to delay is presented to any dragoman when a traveller offers to hire him by the day. Hanna is promised twenty-five shillings a day to be captain-general of our whole troop, to go where and when we wish, to provide everything, do all our cooking, packing, guiding, and fighting, and on extra occasions and routes to expect some extra payment. Delay is now certainly a speculation on his part alone, as we are ready to start. Hanna casts up an imploring look to the clouds and is greeted by a few drops of rain. He thinks it will rain. So do we. After considerable controversy, we are under way, and leave the khan-gate at ten minutes past eleven. We travel southward. In twenty minutes nothing can be seen of Sidon but the old castle and fort of Louis, of which we have already spoken, and which seems built so as to form part of the southern wall. Our way is over a coast-plain, and is well defined by the tracks on the road. And now our course is south-southwest; and in fifteen minutes we cross the dry Wady Senik, not containing as much water as the road. We left the city with a beautiful rainbow before us; but rainbows only promise rain, which is coming rapidly upon us. One or two miles off, on our left, are signs of a larger growth of

THE WHEEL AT THE CISTERN.

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We

trees than any we have hitherto seen on our journey. soon enter a grove of mimosa-trees, closely meeting overhead, and several hundred feet in length. They form a charming contrast to the desolate hills we have passed. A short distance farther we meet the delicate fringe-like tamarisk, called ittel in Egypt; and then appears the fig in abundance, and a variety of cane; and at twenty minutes before twelve o'clock we pass a beautiful and fruited orangegrove on the right, of a dark and healthful green, rich in foliage and in golden fruit, irrigated by water drawn by the ancient wheel at the cistern.*

We now enter upon a larger plain. The sea rolls in, wave after wave, on the right, and about a mile to the left are the mountains; while the rich and level soil stretches onward for several miles. The land is freer from rocks and darker than we have yet seen it; and the region must be delightful in the spring and early summer. At twenty minutes before twelve o'clock, there are before us patches of trees-one consisting of about sixty—in an enclosure. The mountains are terraced like the hills on the Rhine. At eight minutes before twelve o'clock we pass a fragment of a prostrate column, some ten feet long, having the names of IMPERATORES CÆSARES, L. SEPTIMUS SEVERUS, PIUS PERTINAX, ET M[ARCUS] AURELIUS. The burden of forty-five

Every revolution of the chain of buckets causes as many waves of water to run down the stream to the garden as there are buckets on the wheel; so there are a series of regular wavelets or pulsations. And, as we stand looking at the pulsations running off into the various channels, the sixth verse of Eccles. xii. suggests to us the thought that, whether Solomon understood the circulation of the blood or not, he could not have chosen a more appropriate figure to express the pulsating circulation of the blood than that drawn from "the wheel at the cistern." In Egypt this is the general mode of irrigation, ir. connexion with little channels or streams, which are turned frequently into a parched portion of the garden by the hand, or even the foot, by simply breaking down some little barrier; and it is probable that to some such custom allusion is made in Ps. cxxvi. 4:-" Turn again our captivity, O Lord, as the streams in the South;" i.e., turn us as the streams are turned toward the land that mourns for us.