by her tears, rose from the tomb, his love no whit less passionate than it had been before the catastrophe.  This is nothing else than the Chaldaean legend of Ishtar and Dumuzi presented in a form more fully symbolical of the yearly marriage of Earth and Heaven.  Like the Lady of Byblos at her master’s approach, Earth is thrilled by the first breath of spring, and abandons herself without shame to the caresses of Heaven:  she welcomes him to her arms, is fructified by him, and pours forth the abundance of her flowers and fruits.  Them comes summer and kills the spring:  Earth is burnt up and withers, she strips herself of her ornaments, and her fruitfulness departs till the gloom and icy numbness of winter have passed away.  Each year the cycle of the seasons brings back with it the same joy, the same despair, into the life of the world; each year Baalat falls in love with her Adonis and loses him, only to bring him back to life and lose him again in the coming year.

The whole neighbourhood of Byblos, and that part of Mount Lebanon in which it lies, were steeped in memories of this legend from the very earliest times.  We know the precise spot where the goddess first caught sight of her lover, where she unveiled herself before him, and where at the last she buried his mutilated body, and chanted her lament for the dead.  A river which flows southward not far off was called the Adonis, and the valley watered by it was supposed to have been the scene of this tragic idyll.  The Adonis rises near Aphaka,* at the base of a narrow amphitheatre, issuing from the entrance of an irregular grotto, the natural shape of which had, at some remote period, been altered by the hand of man; in three cascades it bounds into a sort of circular basin, where it gathers to itself the waters of the neighbouring springs, then it dashes onwards under the single arch of a Roman bridge, and descends in a series of waterfalls to the level of the valley below.

* Aphaka means “spring” in Syriac.  The site of the temple and town of Aphaka, where a temple of Aphrodite and Adonis still stood in the time of the Emperor Julian, had long been identified either with Fakra, or with El-Yamuni.  Seetzen was the first to place it at El-Afka, and his proposed identification has been amply confirmed by the researches of Penan.

[Illustration:  256.jpg VALLEY OF THE ADONIS]

     Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph.

[Illustration:  256a.jpg THE AMPHITHEATRE OF APHAKA AND THE SOURCE OF THE NAHH-IBRAHIM]

     Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph.