Page:Syria, the land of Lebanon (1914).djvu/211

THE CEDARS OF THE LORD above the sea, is eight miles long and at its widest three miles across. Though it is really broken by hundreds of hills, these are dwarfed into insignificance by the great peaks which rise behind them, and in a distant view the surface of the plateau seems perfectly level.

Here, amid surroundings of rare beauty and yet of solemn loneliness, is set the royal throne of the king of trees. Just back of the cedars the mountains rise to an elevation of over 11,000 feet. Around them is vast emptiness and silence. No other trees grow on this chill, wind-swept height. No under-brush springs up among their rugged trunks. The last cultivated fields stop just below, and the nearest village is out of sight and sound, far down the mountainside. A few goatherds lead their flocks to a near-by spring that is fed from the snow-pockets of the Cedar Mountain; but at night the wolves can be heard howling hungrily, and by the end of the year the snow drifts deep around the old trees and the passes are closed for the winter.

Yet downward from the cedars is a prospect of warm, fertile beauty. You look deep into the dark green valley of the Kadisha, and then across the lower mountains to where, thirty miles away, the "great sea in front of Lebanon" rises high up into the sky; and during one memorable week in the summer you can see, a hundred and fifty miles across the [ 167 ]