irrigation is possible. The ancients dotted these now all but desert
spaces with wells and cisterns; they intersected them with canals,
and covered them with farms and villages, with fortresses and populous
cities. Primæval forests clothed the slopes of the Amanos, and pinewood
from this region was famous both at Babylon and in the towns of Lower
Chaldæa. The plains produced barley and wheat in enormous quantities,
the vine throve there, the gardens teemed with flowers and fruit, and
pistachio and olive trees grew on every slope. The desert was always
threatening to invade the plain, and gained rapidly upon it whenever
a prolonged war disturbed cultivation, or when the negligence of the
inhabitants slackened the work of defence: beyond the lakes and salt
marshes it had obtained a secure hold. At the present time the greater
part of the country between the Orontes and the Euphrates is nothing
but a rocky table-land, ridged with low hills and dotted over with some
impoverished oases, excepting at the foot of Anti-Lebanon, where two
rivers, fed by innumerable streams, have served to create a garden of
marvellous beauty. The Barada, dashing from cascade to cascade, flows
for some distance through gorges before emerging on the plain: scarcely
has it reached level ground than it widens out, divides, and forms
around Damascus a miniature delta, into which a thousand interlacing
channels carry refreshment and fertility. Below the town these streams
rejoin the river, which, after having flowed merrily along for a day's
journey, is swallowed up in a kind of elongated chasm from whence it
never again emerges. At the melting of the snows a regular lake is
formed here, whose blue waters are surrounded by wide grassy margins
"like a sapphire set in emeralds." This lake dries up almost completely
in summer, and is converted into swampy meadows, filled with gigantic
rushes, among which the birds build their nests, and multiply as
unmolested as in the marshes of Chaldæa. The Awaj, unfed by any
tributary, fills a second deeper though smaller basin, while to