with snow, up which winds the rough track whereby travellers reach the summit.  Rills of water are not wanting; flowers bloom to the very edge of the snow, and the walnut-tree flourishes in sheltered places to within two or three thousand feet of the summit; but the general character of the tract is bare and bleak; the villages are few; and the terraced cultivation, which adds so much to the beauty of the western side, is wanting.  In the southern half of the range the descent is abrupt from the crest of the mountain into the Buka’a, or valley of the Litany, and the aspect of the mountain-side is one of “unrelieved bareness."[141]

There is, however, one beauty at one point on this side of the Lebanon range which is absent from the more favoured western region.  On the ascent from Baalbek to the Cedars the traveller comes upon Lake Lemone, a beautiful mountain tarn, without any apparent exit, the only sheet of water in the Lebanon.  Lake Lemone is of a long oval shape, about two miles from one end to the other, and is fed by a stream entering at either extremity, that from the north, which comes down from the village of Ainat, being the more important.  As the water which comes into the lake cannot be discharged by evaporation, we must suppose some underground outlet,[142] by which it is conveyed, through the limestone, into the Litany.

The eastern side of Lebanon drains entirely into this river, which is the only stream whereto it gives birth.  The Litany is the principal of all the Phoenician rivers, for the Orontes must be counted not to Phoenicia but to Syria.  It rises from a small pool or lake near Tel Hushben,[143] about six miles to the south-west of the Baalbek ruins.  Springing from this source, which belongs to Antilibanus rather than to Lebanon, the Litany shortly receives a large accession to its waters from the opposite side of the valley, and thus augmented flows along the lower Buka’a in a direction which is generally a little west of south, receiving on either side a number of streams and rills from both mountains, and giving out in its turn numerous canals for irrigation.  As the river descends with numerous windings, but still with the same general course, the valley of the Buka’a contracts more and more, till finally it terminates in a gorge of a most extraordinary character.  Nothing in the conformation of the strata, or in the lie of ground, indicates the coming marvel[144]—­the roots of Lebanon and Hermon appear to intermix—­and the further progress of the river seems to be barred by a rocky ridge stretching across the valley from east to west, when lo! suddenly, the ridge is cut, as if by a knife, and a deep and narrow chasm opens in it, down which the stream plunges in a cleft 200 feet deep, and so narrow that in one place it is actually bridged over by masses of rock which have fallen from the cliffs above.[145] In the gully below fig-trees and planes, besides many shrubs, find a footing, and the moist walls of rock on either side are hung with