e, flows
for some distance through gorges before emerging on the plain: scarcely
has it reached level ground than it widens out, divides, and forms
around Damascus a miniature delta, into which a thousand interlacing
channels carry refreshment and fertility. Below the town these streams
rejoin the river, which, after having flowed merrily along for a day's
journey, is swallowed up in a kind of elongated chasm from whence it
never again emerges. At the melting of the snows a regular lake is
formed here, whose blue waters are surrounded by wide grassy margins
"like a sapphire set in emeralds." This lake dries up almost completely
in summer, and is converted into swampy meadows, filled with gigantic
rushes, among which the birds build their nests, and multiply as
unmolested as in the marshes of Chaldaea. The Awaj, unfed by any
tributary, fills a second deeper though smaller basin, while to
the south two other lesser depressions receive the waters of the
Anti-Lebanon and the Hauran. Syria is protected from the encroachments
of the desert by a continuous barrier of pools and beds of reeds:
towards the east the space reclaimed resembles a verdant promontory
thrust boldly out into an ocean of sand. The extent of the cultivated
area is limited on the west by the narrow strip of rock and clay which
forms the littoral. From the mouth of the Litany to that of the Orontes,
the coast presents a rugged, precipitous, and inhospitable appearance.
There are no ports, and merely a few ill-protected harbours, or narrow
beaches lying under formidable headlands. One river, the Nahr el-Kebir,
which elsewhere would not attract the traveller's attention, is here
noticeable as being the only stream whose waters flow constantly and
with tolerable regularity; the others, the Leon, the Adonis,* and the
Nahr el-Kelb,* can scarcely even be called torrents, being precipitated
as it were in one leap from the Lebanon to the Mediterranean. Olives,
vines, and corn cover the maritime plain, while in ancient times the
heights were clothed with impenetrable forests of oak, pine, larch,
cypress, spruce, and cedar. The mountain range drops in altitude towards
the centre of the country and becomes merely a line of low hills,
connecting Gebel Ansarieh with the Lebanon proper; beyond the latter
it continues without interruption, till at length, above the narrow
Phoenician coast road, it rises in the form of an almost insurmountable
wall. Near to the termination o