is the first day of May. We
walk on the snow, and pack a basketful on one of the mules, and pelt
each other with snowballs.

We have gone back another month in the calendar and are now at the place
where "winter lingers in the lap of spring." Snowdrops, crocuses, and
little purple grape-hyacinths are blooming at the edge of the drifts.
The thorny shrubs and bushes, and spiny herbs like astragalus and
cousinia, are green-stemmed but leafless, and the birds that flutter
among them are still in the first rapture of vernal bliss, the gay music
that follows mating and precedes nesting. Big dove-coloured partridges,
beautifully marked with black and red, are running among the rocks. We
are at the turn of the year, the surprising season when the tide of
light and life and love swiftly begins to rise.

From this Alpine region we descend through two months in half a day. It
is mid-March on a beautiful green plain where herds of horses were
feeding around an encampment of black Bedouin tents; the beginning of
April at Khan Meithelun, on the post-road, where there are springs, and
poplar-groves, in one of which we eat our lunch, with lemonade cooled by
the snows of Hermon; the end of April at Dimas, where we find our tents
pitched upon the threshing-floor, a levelled terrace of clay looking
down upon the flat roofs of the village.

Our camp is 3,600 feet above sea-level, and our morning path follows the
telegraph-poles steeply down to the post-road, and so by a more gradual
descent along the hard and dusty turnpike toward Damascus. The
landscape, at first, is bare and arid: rounded reddish mountains, gray
hillsides, yellowish plains faintly tinged with a thin green. But at
El-Hami the road drops into the valley of the Barada, the far-famed
River Abana, and we find ourselves in a verdant paradise.

Tall trees arch above the road; white balconies gleam through the
foliage; the murmur and the laughter of flowing streams surround us. The
railroad and the carriage-road meet and cross each other down the vale.
Country houses and cafes, some dingy and dilapidated, others new and
trim, are half hidden among the groves or perched close beside the
highway. Poplars and willows, plane-trees and lindens, walnuts and
mulberries, apricots and almonds, twisted fig-trees and climbing roses,
grow joyfully wherever the parcelled water flows in its many channels.
Above this line, on the sides of the vale, everything is bare and brown
and dry. But