Page:The lives of celebrated travellers (Volume 1).djvu/324

 *miration from the travellers. The site of Baalbec, on the cool side of a valley, between two lofty ridges of mountains, is highly salubrious and beautiful; and the creations of art which formerly adorned it were no way inferior (and this is the highest praise the works of man can receive!) to the beauties which nature eternally reproduces in those delicious regions. Time and the Ottomans, however, have shown that they are less durable.

When a place affords nothing for the contemplation of curiosity but the wrecks of former ages, it usually detains the footsteps of the traveller but a short time; and accordingly Maundrell and his companions quitted Baalbec early next morning, and, penetrating through the snowy defiles of Mount Lebanon into the maritime plains of Syria, arrived in two days at Tripoli. From hence, on the 9th of May, Maundrell departed with a guide to visit the famous cedars so frequently alluded to in the Scriptures, and which, from the prodigious longevity of the tree, may be those which the poets and prophets of Israel viewed with so much admiration. The extreme brevity of the original narrative permits us to describe this excursion in the traveller's own words:—"Having gone for three hours across the plain of Tripoli, I arrived," says he, "at the foot of Libanus; and from thence continually ascending, not without great fatigue, came in four hours and a half to a small village called Eden, and in two hours and a half more to the cedars.

"These noble trees grow among the snow, near the highest part of Lebanon, and are remarkable as well for their own age and largeness as for those frequent allusions made to them in the Word of God. Here are some of them very old and of a prodigious bulk, and others younger of a smaller size. Of the former I could reckon up only sixteen, and the latter are very numerous.  I measured one of the largest, and found it twelve yards six inches in girth, and yet