surrounding countries for variety of picturesque scenery.

The geology of the Lebanon is exceedingly complicated. "While the
bulk of the mountain, and all the higher ranges, are without exception
limestone of the early cretaceous period, the valleys and gorges
are filled with formations of every possible variety, sedimentary,
metamorphic, and igneous. Down many of them run long streams of trap
or basalt; occasionally there are dykes of porphyry and greenstone, and
then patches of sandstone, before the limestone and flint recur."[133]
Some slopes are composed entirely of soft sandstone; many patches are of
a hard metallic-sounding trap or porphyry; but the predominant formation
is a greasy or powdery limestone, bare often, but sometimes 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