Page:Syria, the land of Lebanon (1914).djvu/235

THE GIANT STONES OF BAALBEK or three dusty palms bowing listlessly over the dry, brown earth in the sizzling heat.

I had always thought of Baalbek as a magnificent ruin in the midst of a wilderness; at best, I expected to find huddled beneath the temples a tiny hamlet like that at Palmyra. But as we came nearer to the spot of green about the columns, it grew larger and larger, and finally opened out into a prosperous looking town of five thousand inhabitants besides, as we discovered later, a garrison of Turkish soldiers and a host of summer visitors. The bazaars were busy and noisy, and the half-dozen hotels were filled with the cream of Syrian society. Gay young prodigals from Beirut clattered recklessly along on blooded mares, or lolled back in rickety barouches, talking French to pretty girls whose silk dresses were so nearly correct that our masculine eyes could not detect just what was the matter with them.

The German archæologists who were then excavating among the ruins told us that the hotel where we had planned to lodge was incorrectly constructed and would surely fall down some day, and advised us to take rooms at the more substantial building where they were dwelling. Here we found one of those typically cosmopolitan companies which add so much variety to life in Syria. Besides the Germans, there was a suave little Turkish gentleman, a very amiable Armenian lady, a radiantly beautiful Hungarian, an English "baroness" who did not  [ 187 ]