way in this country.  Carriages are used for conveying passengers, but freight is usually moved on the backs of horses, camels, donkeys, or men.  Some wagons and carts are to be seen, but they are not numerous.  It is remarkable what loads are piled upon the donkeys, probably the commonest beasts of burden in Damascus.  Sometimes the poor little creatures are almost hidden from view by the heavy burdens they are required to bear, which may consist of grapes to be sold, or rubbish to be carried out of the city.  Sometimes they are ridden by as many as three people at once.  If the gospel were to get a firm hold on these people, the donkeys would fare better.

About 333 B.C., Damascus came under the control of Alexander the Great.  Antiochus Dionysius reigned there three years, but was succeeded by Aretas of Arabia in 85 B.C.  Under Trajan it became a Roman provincial city.  The Mongols took it in 1260, and the Tartars plundered it in 1300.  An enemy marched against it in 1399, but the citizens purchased immunity from plunder by paying a “sum of a million pieces of gold.”  In 1516, when Selim, the Turkish Sultan, marched in, it became one of the provincial capitals of the Turkish Empire, and so continues.  There was a very serious massacre here in 1860.  All the consulates, except the British and Prussian, were burned, and the entire Christian quarter was turned into ruins.  In the two consulates that were spared many lives were preserved, but it is said that “no fewer than six thousand unoffending Christians ... were thus murdered in Damascus alone,” and “the whole number of the Christians who perished in these days of terror is estimated at fourteen thousand.”  A number of the leaders were afterward beheaded, and a French force, numbering ten thousand, was sent into the country.  The Mohammedans have about two hundred mosques and colleges in this city, which was once far advanced in civilization.

I left Damascus and returned toward the coast to Rayak, where I took the train on a branch line for Baalbec, the Syrian city of the sun, a place having no Biblical history, but being of interest on account of the great stones to be seen there.  No record has been preserved as to the origin of the city, but coins of the first century of the Christian era show that it was then a Roman colony.  It is situated in the valley of the Litany, at an elevation of two thousand eight hundred and forty feet above the sea.  The chief ruins are in a low part of the valley by the side of the present town, and are surrounded by gardens.  Within the inclosing wall are the remains of the temple of Jupiter and the temple of the sun.  The hand of time and the hand of man have each had a share in despoiling these ruins, but they still speak with eloquence of their grandeur at an earlier date.  The wall is so low on the north that it is supposed to have been left unfinished.  Here are nine stones, each said to be thirty feet long, ten feet thick and thirteen