clothed with a soft herbage, or with a thick tangle of shrubs, or with lofty forest trees.  The ridge of the mountain is everywhere naked limestone rock, except in the comparatively few places which attain the highest elevation, where it is coated or streaked with snow.  Two summits are especially remarkable, that of Jebel Sunnin towards the south, which is a conspicuous object from Beyrout,[134] and is estimated to exceed the height of 9,000 feet,[135] and that of Jebel Mukhmel towards the north, which has been carefully measured and found to fall a very little short of 10,200 feet.[136] The latter, which forms a sort of amphitheatre, circles round and impends over a deep hollow or basin, opening out towards the west, in which rise the chief sources that go to form the romantic stream of the Kadisha.  The sides of the basin are bare and rocky, fringed here and there with the rough knolls which mark the deposits of ancient glaciers, the “moraines” of the Lebanon.  In this basin stand “the Cedars.”  It is not indeed true, as was for a long time supposed, that the cedar grove of Jebel Mukhmel is the sole remnant of that primeval cedar-forest which was anciently the glory of the mountain.  Cedars exist on Lebanon in six other places at least, if not in more.  Near Tannurin, on one of the feeders of the Duweir, a wild gorge is clothed from top to bottom with a forest of trees, untouched by the axe, the haunt of the panther and the bear, which on examination have been found to be all cedars, some of a large size, from fifteen to eighteen feet in girth.  They grow in clusters, or scattered singly, in every variety of situation, some clinging to the steep slopes, or gnarled and twisted on the bare hilltops, others sheltered in the recesses of the dell.  There are also cedar-groves at B’sherrah; at El Hadith; near Duma, five hours south-west of El Hadith; in one of the glens north of Deir-el-Kamar, at Etnub, and probably in other places.[137] But still “the Cedars” of Jebel Mukhmel are entitled to pre-eminence over all the rest, both as out-numbering any other cluster, and still more as exceeding all the rest in size and apparent antiquity.  Some of the patriarchs are of enormous girth; even the younger ones have a circumference of eighteen feet; and the height is such that the birds which dwell among the upper branches are beyond the range of an ordinary fowling-piece.

But it is through the contrasts which it presents that Lebanon has its extraordinary power of attracting and delighting the traveller.  Below the upper line of bare and worn rock, streaked in places with snow, and seamed with torrent courses, a region is entered upon where the freshest and softest mountain herbage, the greenest foliage, and the most brilliant flowers alternate with deep dells, tremendous gorges, rocky ravines, and precipices a thousand feet high.  Scarcely has the voyager descended from the upper region of naked and rounded rock, when he comes upon “a tremendous chasm—­the bare amphitheatre