to come violently into collision. Confined between the sea and the
desert, Syria offers the only route of easy access to an army marching
northwards from Africa into Asia, and all conquerors, whether attracted
to Mesopotamia or to Egypt by the accumulated riches on the banks of the
Euphrates or the Nile, were obliged to pass through it in order to reach
the object of their cupidity. It might, perhaps, have escaped this fatal
consequence of its position, had the formation of the country permitted
its tribes to mass themselves together, and oppose a compact body to
the invading hosts; but the range of mountains which forms its backbone
subdivides it into isolated districts, and by thus restricting each
tribe to a narrow existence maintained among them a mutual antagonism.
The twin chains, the Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon, which divide the
country down the centre, are composed of the same kind of calcareous
rocks and sandstone, while the same sort of reddish clay has been
deposited on their slopes by the glaciers of the same geological
period.*

* Drake remarked in the Lebanon several varieties of
limestone, which have been carefully catalogued by Blanche
and Lartet. Above these strata, which belong to the Jurassic
formation, come reddish sandstone, then beds of very hard
yellowish limestone, and finally marl. The name Lebanon, in
Assyrian Libnana, would appear to signify "the white
mountain;" the Amorites called the Anti-Lebanon Saniru,
Shenir, according to the Assyrian texts and the Hebrew
books.

Arid and bare on the northern side, they sent out towards the south
featureless monotonous ridges, furrowed here and there by short narrow
valleys, hollowed out in places into basins or funnel-shaped ravines,