Page:Eothen, or, Traces of travel brought home from the East by Kinglake, Alexander William.djvu/239

Rh puzzling station in eternity, between the birthless past and the future that has no end. Behind me I left an old, decrepit world—religions dead and dying—calm tyrannies expiring in silence; women—hushed and swathed, and turned into waxen dolls; love flown, and in its stead mere royal and "paradise" pleasures.—Before me there waited glad bustle and strife,—love itself, an emulous game;—Religion, a cause and a controversy, well smitten and well defended,—men governed by reasons and suasion of speech—wheels—going,—steam buzzing—a mortal race, and a slashing pace, and the devil taking the hindmost—taking me, by Jove (for that was my inner care), if I lingered too long upon the difficult pass that leads from thought to action.

I descended and went towards the west.

The group of cedars remaining on this part of the Lebanon is held sacred by the Greek Church on account of a prevailing notion that the trees were standing at a time when the temple of Jerusalem was built. They occupy three or four acres on the mountain’s side, and many of them are gnarled in a way that implies great age, but except these signs I saw nothing in their appearance or conduct that tended to prove them contemporaries of the cedars employed in Solomon’s Temple. The final cause to which these aged survivors owed their preservation was explained to me in the evening by a glorious old fellow (a Christian chief), who made me welcome in the valley of Eden. In ancient times the whole range of the Lebanon had been covered with cedars, and as the fertile plains beneath became more and more infested by government officers and tyrants of high and low degree, the people by degrees abandoned them and flocked to the rugged mountains, which were less accessible to their indolent oppressors. The cedar forests gradually shrank under the axe of the encroaching multitudes, and seemed at last to be on the point of disappearing entirely, when an aged chief who ruled in this district, and who had witnessed the great change effected even in his own lifetime, chose to say that some sign or memorial should be left of the vast woods with which the mountains had formerly been clad, and commanded accordingly that this group of trees (which was