Page:Syria, the land of Lebanon (1914).djvu/93

ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS Beirut. It is very much cooler now. In midsummer, refreshing breezes blow down from unseen snow-banks among the mountaintops. In winter—if, indeed, the traffic is not entirely blocked by drifts which choke the railway cuts—the journey is memorable for its piercing, inescapable cold, and the natives who gather idly at the stations wear heavy sheepskin cloaks and keep their heads and shoulders swathed in thick shawls, though, strangely enough, their legs may be bare and their frost-bitten feet protected only by low slippers.

At last the jolting of the rack-and-pinion ceases, the train quickens its speed, passes through two short tunnels, swings around a high embankment; and over the crests of the lower hills we see a long, narrow stretch of level country, bordered on its farther side by a wall-like line of very steep mountains. The profile of the "Eastern Mountains"—as we behold them from this point we can hardly avoid using the Syrian name for Anti-Lebanon—seems almost exactly horizontal, and the resemblance of the range to a tremendous rampart is heightened by the massive buttresses which reach out at regular intervals between the courses of the winter torrents.

The valley before us is that which the Greeks named Coele-Syria or "Hollow Syria." In modern Arabic it is called the Bika&apos; or "Cleft." Just as in Palestine the Jordan River and its two lakes are hemmed in by mountains which rise many thousand [ 63 ]