The whole night long, torrential downpours, driven on by an unleashed wind. At the beginning of a cold grey morning, in incessant rain, we strike camp, two hours after our neighbours, the cameleers from Baghdad. To enter Beirut, we have put on our European clothes again, as dull as the approaching West itself and as cheerless as the time of day.

Around endless hairpin bends, we are forced to climb Mount Lebanon as high as the clouds and the snow, in thick fog and icy darkness. The deluge does not stop. We meet caravans, carriages and long queues of wagons pulled by mules. The whole area is hideously turned topsy-turvy by the Damascus railway works. Everywhere, there are gaping tunnel entrances among the rocks, smoking machines, piles of iron rails, rock falls and wet landslips. A kind of melted snow soon drenches our clothes and trickles over us, so cold our hands are numb and so painful we could cry.

We are near the summit now and make our way through clouds so dense that we can no longer see. Then, when they break, we see a black abyss beneath our feet.

At last, we are at the top, and during a break in the clouds, in a sudden display across the horizon, the whole region appears before us: the coast of Syria and the Mediterranean like a hazy green sky, which might revert to its different and true appearance, is for the moment so turbulent and dark. Now, we are about to go down the other side of dark Mount Lebanon. The rain stops and the breaks in the clouds become larger and clearer. The air is milder and our hands no longer hurt. From time to time, a ray of sun appears to dry us. Gradually, we leave behind the physical difficulties of this kind of cold nightmare.

A sun-lit boundless world unfolds before us. The thick clouds are all being driven away towards the mountain tops from where we have come, and then falling behind and disappearing. We can see the regions below from a slightly unusual perspective, the hills appearing flattened on the ground and the sea, now blue, seems to have been lifted high in the air. The lower hills, covered with pine forests and washed by the heavy rains, are of an intense green colour.