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 Dûma, 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 of the upper basin
contracts into a valley of about 2,000 feet deep, rent at its bottom
into a cleft a thousand feet deeper still, down which dashes a river,
buried between these stupendous walls of rock. All above the chasm is