catholic priest, who superintends a parish of twenty-five Christian
families. This being near the great temple, I hastened to it in the
morning, before any body was apprised of my arrival.

The work of Wood, who accompanied Dawkins to Baalbec in 1751, and the
subsequent account of the place given by Volney, who visited Baalbec in
1784, render it unnecessary for me to enter into any description of
these ruins. I shall only observe that Volney is incorrect in describing
the rock of which the buildings are constructed as granite; it is of the
primitive calcareous kind, but harder than the stone of Tedmor. There
are, however, many remains of granite columns in different parts of the
building.

I observed no Greek inscriptions; there were some few in Latin and in
Arabic; and I copied the following Cufic inscription on the side of a
stair-case, leading down into some subterranean

[p.13]chambers below the small temple, which the Emir has walled up to
prevent a search for hidden treasures. [Cufic inscription]

Having seen, a few months before, the ruins of Tedmor, a comparison
between these two renowned remains of antiquity naturally offered itself
to my mind. The entire view of the ruins of Palmyra, when seen at a
certain distance, is infinitely more striking than those of Baalbec, but
there is not any one spot in the ruins of Tedmor so imposing as the
interior view of the temple of Baalbec. The temple of the Sun at Tedmor
is upon a grander scale than that of Baalbec, but it is choked up with
Arab houses, which admit only of a view of the building in detail. The
archilecture of Baalbec is richer than that of Tedmor.