Page:Syria, the land of Lebanon (1914).djvu/241

THE GIANT STONES OF BAALBEK and watch the long shadows of the setting sun creep over what have been called "the most beautiful mass of ruins that man has ever seen and the like of which he will never behold again."

Our superlative expressions are prostituted to such base uses that it is hard to find words to picture adequately these colossal structures. To say that they are most majestic, gigantic, stupendous, is only to trifle with terms. The mere partition-wall beneath us is nineteen feet thick, a single stone in one of the gate-towers is twenty-five feet long, and the entrance stairway, now half-buried beneath an orchard, is a hundred and fifty feet wide. Everything about us is immense; yet the parts are so nicely proportioned that at first their size does not seem very unusual. The German archaeologists warned me against jumping carelessly from one stone to another. "The distance between them will be greater than you think." You have to revise your ordinary judgments of perspective before you can realize that yonder little alcove in the Great Court is as big as an ordinary church, or can make yourself believe that the outlines of the Temple of the Sun enclose an area as large as that of Westminster Abbey, or can break the habit of thinking condescendingly of the "Smaller Temple"—which is one of the finest Græco-Roman edifices in existence. Suddenly you see the acropolis in its real immensity and beauty, and then you  [ 193 ]