Page:Syria, the land of Lebanon (1914).djvu/219

THE CEDARS OF THE LORD beams of the Temple of Apollo at Utica lasted almost twelve centuries.

Probably the wood is so enduring because it grows so slowly. When you are told that a slender shoot, hardly shoulder-high, is ten or twelve years old, you begin to speculate as to the probable age of the patriarchs of the grove. On a broken branch only thirty inches in diameter I once, with the aid of a magnifying glass, counted 577 rings—577 years. And some of the cedars are forty feet and over in girth! Certainly these must be a thousand years old, probably two thousand. We are tempted to believe that one or two of the most venerable were saplings when the axemen of Hiram came cutting cedar logs for the Temple at Jerusalem. The most rugged and weather-beaten of them all, called the Guardian—surely this hoary giant of the forest has lived through all the ages since Solomon, and from his lofty throne on Lebanon has calmly looked down over Syria and the Great Sea while Jew and Assyrian, Persian and Egyptian, Greek and Roman, Arab and Crusader and Turk, have labored and fought and sinned and died for the possession of this goodly land!

The trees rise on half a dozen little knolls quite near to the edge of the plateau; and within a few minutes' climb are a number of tall, steeple-like rocks which, through the erosion of the softer stone, have become almost entirely cut off from the main mass [ 173 ]