A wind, chilled as it passed over the white-mountain tops, has been whistling all night.

As we awake, the atmosphere is as if swept absolutely clean. The snow glitters and the slender dominating queen-like colonnade of the temple of the Sun God towers up in the air. Above the fresh new green of the poplars and high above the temple of Jupiter and the pile of grand ruins, the colonnade, all rosy and shining beneath the rays of the new-morning sun, stands out against snowy Mount Lebanon.

As we are camped at some distance, we can scarcely see the Baalbek of today; it is tiny, almost lilliputian beside the rest of Baal's grand Baalbek. In front of our tents which are once more folded away, as they are each day, everyone going off to the fields files past, all the animals led by shepherds, thousands of black goats, donkeys and she-camels with their young. This procession of morning life seems humble and primitive beside the surviving ruins of a past of inconceivable pagan splendour. And yonder colonnade which has seen so many sunrises and watched over so many beginnings of the day still looks out on this one, sad and grand.

On we march for hours on a straight level path; our horses, being used to unpredictable paths, seem surprised.

We are in vast treeless plains of barley and rocks between two parallel mountain chains: Mount Lebanon on the right and the Anti-Lebanon on the left, both crowned and mottled with snow. We are lashed mercilessly by a bitterly cold wind. Snow, snow on all sides and at the feet of the mountains, more marbling extends, almost as white: patches of daisies.

After the grand ruins which soon disappear, at the side of a field, we come across a strange little pagan temple, hexagonal in shape, with granite and porphyry columns. Then, there is nothing to remind us of the past. We proceed more and more into a modern Syria, a Christian Syria, meeting horsemen, even carriages, and unveiled Maronite peasant women, some of them extremely beautiful.