rivers, fed by innumerable streams, have served to create a garden of marvellous beauty. The Barada, dashing from cascade to cascade, 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 Chaldæa. 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 Litâny 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 of Coele-Syria, but separated from it by a range of hills, there opens out on the western slopes of Hermon a valley unlike any other in the world. At this point the surface of the earth has been rent in prehistoric times by volcanic action, leaving a chasm which has never since closed up. A river, unique in character—the Jordan—flows down this gigantic crevasse, fertilizing the valley formed by it from end to end.***