The valley is now used as pastures and farming lands; wheat, oats and grapes being the principal productions. The river Leontes flows through the plain, and the fields are watered mostly by irrigation. Yet these people are only playing with agriculture. The valley is rich and fertile, and would abundantly reward honest labor. But honest labor is unknown in Syria. These trifling people anger the soil with their rude implements of agriculture, and the soil answers with a crop of thorns and thistles. She thrusts out her claws and thus frights off the lean, lazy, leisure-loving Bedouin. The people sow the seeds of idleness and reap the legitimate fruits—hunger, want and starvation. I never before knew what squalid poverty meant. But if it is to go half naked, and almost the other half, too; if it is for human beings to live in the same rock-pens with cows, goats and asses, and that, too, without a fireplace, without chairs, tables or bedsteads; if it is to live on half rations of “husks and hominy,”—if this is squalid poverty, I have seen it and know what it means. Each family seems to be blest with a dozen or fifteen heirs—heirs of filth and poverty! I am reminded of the old adage, “poor people for children and negroes for dogs.” These people and their ancestry have inhabited this country only 4,000 years, and yet within that short time they have managed to accumulate a mass of filth and ignorance that is truly astonishing. We are now encamped in the citadel of Baalbek. This place has much interest for the traveler and the historian, because of its once mighty temples. The temples were three in number. They were all built on the same stupendous substructions. The rock foundations go deep into the ground, and are traversed by great subterranean passages which look like railroad tunnels through mountains of granite. The Temple of the Sun was three hundred feet long, one hundred and sixty feet wide, and was surrounded by fifty-four columns, six of which are standing at present. These six are enough for twelve months’ study. They are solid marble, eight feet in diameter, and together with the entablature which joins them at the top, ninety feet high! How shapely, how graceful, how towering and sublime! The carving on the entablature is exquisite. It looks like stucco work. The other columns are fallen and broken, but these six look as if they were put up only yesterday.