Handbook for Travelers:: Page 347

Handbook for Travelers:: Page 361

From Page 341, Handbook for Travelers: (1898)

From Damascus to Ez-Zebedânî via Helbûn. Starting from the Bâb Tâmâ (p. 360) we follow the Aleppo road and diverge from it to the left after 11 minutes. After 9 min. we avoid a path to the left, and after 14 min. emerge from among the gardens. About 1/4 hr. to the right is the village of Kâbûn. We reach (20 min.) the village of Berzeh. A Muslim legend makes this the birthplace of Abraham, or at least the point to which he and his servants penetrated in this direction (Gen. xiv. 15). Here we turn to the left, and in 8 min. reach the entrance of a gorge. In 33 min.

View From the Mountain

Damascus is beautiful from the mountain. It is beautiful even to foreigners accustomed to luxuriant vegetation, and I can easily understand how unspeakably beautiful it must be to eyes that are only used to the God-forsaken barrenness and desolation of Syria. I should think a Syrian would go wild with ecstacy when such a picture bursts upon him for the first time.

Three Days Journey to Damascus - Done in Two

The first serious fall-out among the Excursionists occurred as the caravan- serai left Baalbek. It was a Friday morning. Damascus was some sixty hot and ragged miles away. The dragomen Abraham and Mohammed told them it would take three days. The New Pilgrims counted on their fingers: Friday, Saturday, Sunday - and declared that would be impossible as it would mean travelling on the Sabbath; they would all have to complete the journey in two days to retain their saintliness.

From Unexplored Syria, pg 36 

You were so kind as to insert a letter from me last May concerning `Tadmor in the Wilderness,' and I shall feel glad if you find a pendent letter about Ba'albak, its rival in the traveller's interest, -worthy of a similar favour.  Many of your readers have visited or intend to visit its magnificent ruins —gigantic remains which Rome herself cannot show -- and they will be thankful for the information which my five days under canvas in the midst of its temples enable me to give them.

It is hard to see why Baalbek was included in the Mark Twain’s Holy Land tour; it is surely magnificent, quite magnificent, but its magnificence stems from it being the Roman Empire’s most sacred site of pagan worship, and the largest temple complex in the whole Roman Empire.

From Handbook for Travelers (1898): Route 37 Page 367

We had a tedious ride of about five hours, in the sun, across the Valley of Lebanon. It proved to be not quite so much of a garden as it had seemed from the hill-sides. It was a desert, weed-grown waste, littered thickly with stones the size of a man’s fist. Here and there the natives had scratched the ground and reared a sickly crop of grain, but for the most part the valley was given up to a handful of shepherds, whose flocks were doing what they honestly could to get a living, but the chances were against them.