I am in the Valley of Lebanon, the high, narrow plain which lies between the two ranges of the Lebanon Mountains. The word Lebanon means “white,” perhaps because of the walls of chalk or limestone which are a feature of the whole range. Just now the highest peaks are white with snow. These ranges extend north and south parallel with the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Beginning a little below the border of Asia Minor, they lose themselves in the Holy Land. In reading of them I have always thought they were only hills. They are higher than any mountains of our country east of the Mississippi, and the average height of the range nearest the coast is a thousand feet greater than that of Mount Washington. Mount Hermon is more than nine thousand feet high and Jebel Makmel measures ten thousand two hundred feet. The elevation of the Valley of Lebanon itself is twice that of the topmost peaks of the Blue Ridge of Virginia, and it slopes from here to the north as far as Aleppo and to the south beyond Dan, where rises the Jordan.

In this little valley, which is less than one hundred miles long and from five to eight miles wide, walled by these mighty mountains, lie the ruins of Baalbek, once the most wonderful temples known to the ages. I have spent hours in wandering through them, and their immensity and beauty steadily grow upon me. I despair of being able to describe them and can only hope to give you bits of the details.

I have seen most of the world’s mighty ruins. In the past year I have wandered through the tombs of the Mings outside Mukden, Manchuria; I have stood upon the Temple of Heaven in Peking, and have climbed the great Chinese wall. I have gone through the Temples of Karnak at the hundred-gated city of Thebes far up the Nile; I have taken photographs of the Colossi of Memnon, and have measured the stones of the Pyramids with a two-foot rule. Not long ago I visited the Temple of Boro Boedor in the heart of Java to describe its three miles of unique carvings, and last year I spent some time in the forts of the Moguls at Delhi and wrote of the Taj Mahal and its marvellous beauties. I have also seen Timgad, the excavated city on the edge of the Sahara, and have lately gone through the Colosseum at Rome and inspected the equally imposing amphitheatre at El Djem in the heart of the Tunisian desert. All these are wonderful, but Baalbek is their superior.

These ruins have never been so impressive as they are now. For centuries most of them have been as much buried as is Herculaneum, and it was only when the Emperor of Germany made his tour through this part of the world that they began to be brought to the light of day.

I have marched in the Kaiser’s footsteps through Palestine and have seen there the churches and other monuments which he had erected. Before he came to Syria he stopped at Constantinople with the Sultan Abdul Hamid, who gave him a permit to do about as he pleased. As the Kaiser travelled he flattered the Mohammedans, the Christians, and the Jews. He was alive to every possibility, and he stamped “Made in Germany” upon every city he visited. In Damascus he laid a golden wreath on the tomb of Saladin, the famous soldier who fought the Crusaders; and about Jerusalem he built hospitals, schools, and a great sanatorium. Here at Baalbek the Sultan gave him permission to do anything he liked. In the Temple of the Sun is a tablet bearing an inscription in German and Arabic testifying his regard for the Sultan and his pleasure at visiting the ruins. Shortly after leaving he sent German scientists, who organized an army of natives and put them to work excavating the temples. The Germans laid down a railroad track for the dirt cars to carry away mountains of earth and débris. As a result of their work and modern machinery for lifting huge stones into place we have at last a view of these most wonderful temples more as they were in their glory.

But first let me tell you something about the origin of these structures and the gods to whom they were dedicated. The Arabs claim that this, rather than Damascus, is the oldest city in the world. They say that Adam lived here, and that it was between here and the Mediterranean that Cain killed Abel. One of Adam’s favourite residences was Damascus, and Seth lived at Nebi Schitt in the Lebanon Mountains. They will show you where Noah was buried and the town in which Ham lived. They also think that Nimrod reigned in this valley, and they have a tradition that when an angel called upon him he threw the holy one into a blazing furnace from which he came out unharmed. They locate the Tower of Babel at Baalbek and believe that Nimrod built it. According to another legend, Abraham reigned at Damascus and came here frequently. It is also well known that Solomon had a city named Baalath, in which other gods than Jehovah were worshipped. Indeed, it is said that Solomon, in order to please his concubines, built a temple here and that he had a castle which he gave as a present to Balkis, the Queen of Sheba.

Baalbek was well known in the days of the Phœnicians and was a great city in the time of Christ. It was about a hundred years after that that the finest of the temples, the ruins of which we see to-day, were constructed. Then the Roman civilization was in the height of its glory, and the emperors were building cities in north Africa, in Asia Minor, and in other parts of the world. The Romans put up the temples here in honour of Jupiter (Baal), which had in them smaller temples to Venus and Bacchus. They worshipped Baal, the god of the sun, as one of the greatest of their deities, although they had other gods without number.

As to the worship of Baal, there have been gods of that name almost since the beginnings of history. It is a question, indeed, whether the word Baal did not mean “lord,” being a general term for male gods of various kinds. Later on the Greeks considered Baal the god of the sun, classing him with the god represented by Helios, in whose honour the city of Heliopolis in Egypt was built. The worship of Baal runs through the Bible. Samuel rebuked the Israelites for bowing down to him, and Jezebel had four hundred priests of Baal who were confounded by Elijah. Indeed, it is a question whether Beelzebub, or the devil, was not Baalzebub.

Here at Baalbek the finest statue was that of this god. It was of gold and represented a beardless young man clad in armour standing between two golden bulls. He held a whip in his right hand and a thunderbolt and some ears of corn in his left. There were also statues of Mercury and Venus, a Hall of Bacchus, and statues and statuettes of exquisite workmanship. These images were destroyed by the early Christians, who threw down parts of the temples and broke up the carvings in their detestation of all pagan art.

It is impossible to give pictures of the ruins and of the mighty temples as they were in their wonderful beauty. The ruins cover more than ten acres, and the Great Temple alone was about three hundred feet long by one hundred and sixty feet wide. It had a roof upheld by Corinthian columns only, six of which are now standing. These columns are eighty feet high and twenty-two feet in circumference. In entering the temples I went up a gigantic staircase, a great part of which has been destroyed, and came into what is known as the forecourt, which is about two hundred feet wide, and the floor of which was paved with mosaic.

We next went through another court, known as the Court of the Altar, which must cover five or six acres. It is a mass of marble and granite, gigantic columns and delicate carvings being thrown helter-skelter together. Beyond this and up a series of steps are the ruins of the Great Temple itself. At the left is the exquisite Temple of Bacchus, and everywhere are great shafts of marble so wonderfully carved that they would be treasures in any museum.

All this, however, gives no idea of the construction. People wonder how the mighty stones of the Pyramids were put into place, and books have been written to show how the obelisks were taken from the quarries to the sites where they were erected as monuments. The building of the temples of Baalbek was a far greater mechanical triumph. The materials, including columns weighing hundreds of tons, had to be brought up the steep Lebanon Mountains and carried over passes higher than the tops of the Alleghanies. There is granite here which came from far up the Nile; there are marbles from Greece, and great limestone blocks from the quarries near by. The temple has walls sixty feet high, and the mighty columns—seven feet in diameter, and, including the pedestals and capitals, as tall as an eight-story building—rest upon a platform which is more than fifty feet high. These mighty pillars are put up in three sections each twenty feet or more in height and seven feet in diameter. They are so put together that each column looks like one solid block.

In the walls of the temple foundation are what are, I venture, the biggest building blocks ever quarried. One of the walls has three great limestone blocks each of which measures sixty-four feet long, thirteen feet wide, and twelve feet thick. If such stones were placed end to end it would take only about eighty of them to make one mile. These stones were brought from a quarry about a mile away. Some of them have been placed upon the walls at a distance of thirty or more feet from the ground, and are so accurately laid that a knife blade cannot be driven between them.

I got an idea of the size of these blocks by visiting the quarries. Just outside that from which the stones came is one which was cut out of the rock, but for some reason or other was not carried to the structure. It was dragged only a few feet away from the virgin rock, and to-day lies there on its side, half buried in the earth. Upon its top I walked over it. It is so wide that you could drive two motor cars abreast upon it without risk of falling over the edges, and an English traveller here says that a cricket match might be played upon its face, putting the stakes at the right distance apart and giving the bowler at least two feet at the end for his run. This block is as smooth as a marble column and accurately square. Each side of it measures fourteen feet and it is about seventy feet long. If it were stood on end inside a modern ten-story apartment house it would fill ten rooms one above the other, each room fourteen feet square and seven feet high. It has been estimated to weigh fifteen hundred tons and if cut up would make a good load for thirty flat cars.

Think of moving stones like that out of the mountains and up and down hill for a mile without the aid of steam, electricity, or any kind of machinery! That is the kind of work the Romans did eighteen hundred years ago. All through the temples you may see examples of such huge masses moved about and lifted into place.

There are carvings more beautiful than anything seen on our buildings to-day. On some of the blocks still in the structure I saw bunches of grapes no bigger than my thumb as beautifully cut as though made by nature. There were also Cupids and cherubs exquisitely carved. It was said of the artists who built the great temples of Delhi and Agra in India that they worked like Titans and finished like jewellers. The same was true of the Romans of the reigns of Antonius, Caracalla, and Nero.

I have taken photographs of some of the broken columns with myself standing beside them to give an idea of their size. I am five feet eight inches tall and the large columns are fully two feet more in diameter. Some of the wonderful carvings are those which form the frieze above the great pillars two or three hundred feet high up in the air. Among them are the heads of gigantic lions, each head as big as a flour barrel but polished like a fine marble mantel. Through the mouths of these lions emptied the drains of the roof.

The beauties of the temples will be preserved from now on. They are under official guard, and tickets which cost a dollar apiece are required of all who go in. I was shown through by Dr. Michel Alouf, an archæologist, who explained just how the temples looked in the past. He showed me where the early Christians had erected a church inside one temple, defacing the carvings and breaking the noses of the beautiful statues. They took pleasure in destroying the work wrought by heathen artists in honour of pagan gods. Next came the Arabs, who used the place as a fort, throwing great round chunks of marble as big as footballs from its sheltering walls. There are piles of these marble balls inside the temple to-day. They were probably cut from the columns. The Arabs made a mosque in the temple. They wiped out every trace of the Christian religion and used a part of the church for a bath. After them came an earthquake, so that the ruins were mostly covered up until the Germans began their excavations.

I am stopping here in the little town of Baalbek, which stands right on the edge of the ruins. It has an excellent hotel, and its people are hospitable. Its population of five or six thousand is made up of Mohammedans and Christians. Besides a small garrison of soldiers, there are two Greek Catholic monasteries and several girls’ schools. The children followed us as we walked about through the ruins, selling purses made of Syrian silk into which they had woven a design of the six great columns of the temple. They also asked for baksheesh, and the begging palm was everywhere thrust out.

I am surprised at the scanty forestation of these mountains of Lebanon. I had expected to find them covered with woods, whereas they are almost treeless. Their lower slopes are well cultivated and some of them are terraced almost to the top. Thousands of acres, made up of little patches, rise step-like one above another, covering the hills for miles and miles. These patches contain mulberry orchards and vineyards. There are also peaches and apples, and in the valleys are rich fields of wheat, barley, and clover. The chief formation is limestone, and though there are rocks everywhere, the soil seems wonderfully rich.

The cedars of Lebanon may have been great in the past, but they have now almost disappeared. The only ones left are situated about nine or ten hours from Baalbek. The trees grow in the thin soil, which covers the white limestone, the ground being coated with spines, cones, and leaves. Five are very ancient and of great girth, but the tallest is not more than eighty feet high. The largest of all is about fifteen feet thick, so you see they are mere sprouts in comparison with the Big Trees of California and quite small as compared with the giants of Washington and Oregon. The cedars which were taken for the temple at Jerusalem probably came from the region where the old cedars stand, although other parts of the Lebanon Mountains may then have been covered with woods. The logs must have been cut in the forests and carried over the mountains forty or fifty miles to the seacoast. The rafting was done under the direction of King Hiram of Tyre, and the logs were probably towed down to Jaffa, and thence carried up the mountains of Judea to Jerusalem, a distance of about forty miles. The cedars bear cones about as large as a goose egg. The leaves or spines of the cones are solid rather than detached, as those of our cedars at home. The wood is whitish in colour; it is soft, and for building is far inferior to cypress or pine.