from the
ground. It is considered by some antiquarians that they are of a date
greatly anterior to that of the temples, and were intended as the basement
of a different edifice.

In the village of Baalbec there is a small circular Corinthian temple of
very elegant design. It is not more than thirty feet in diameter, and may
have been intended as a tomb. A spacious mosque, now roofless and
deserted, was constructed almost entirely out of the remains of the
temples. Adjoining the court-yard and fountain are five rows of ancient
pillars, forty (the sacred number) in all, supporting light Saracenic
arches. Some of them are marble, with Corinthian capitals, and eighteen
are single shafts of red Egyptian granite. Beside the fountain lies a
small broken pillar of porphyry, of a dark violet hue, and of so fine a
grain that the stone has the soft rich lustre of velvet. This fragment is
the only thing I would carry away if I had the power.

After a day's sojourn, we left Baalbec at noon, and took the road for the
Cedars, which lie on the other side of Lebanon, in the direction of
Tripoli. Our English fellow-travellers chose the direct road to Beyrout.
We crossed the plain in three hours; to the village of Dayr el-Ahmar, and
then commenced ascending the lowest slopes of the great range, whose
topmost ridge, a dazzling parapet of snow, rose high above us. For several
hours, our path led up and down stony ridges, covered with thickets of oak
and holly, and with wild cherry, pear, and olive-trees. Just as the sun
threw the shadows of the highest Lebanon over us, we came upon a narrow,
rocky glen at his very base. Streams that still kept the color and the
coolness of the snow-fields from which they oozed, foamed over the stones
into the chasm at the bottom. The glen descended into a mountain basin, in
which lay the lake of Yemouni, cold and green under the evening shadows.
But just opposite us, on a little shelf of soil, there was a rude mill,
and a group of superb walnut-trees, overhanging the brink of the largest
torrent. We had sent our baggage before us, and the men, with an eye to
the picturesque which I should not have suspected in Arabs, had pitched
our tents under those trees, where the stream poured its snow-cold beakers
beside us, and the tent-door looked down on the plain of Baalbec and
across to the Anti-Lebanon. The miller and two or three peasants, who were
living in this lonely spot, were Christians.

The next morning