Our path the next day leads up to the east over the ridges of the slight depression which lies between Mount Hermon and the rest of the Anti-Lebanon range. We pass the disconsolate village and lake of Kafr Kuk. The water which shone so blue in the distance now confesses itself a turbid, stagnant pool, locked in among the hills, and breeding fevers for those who live beside it. The landscape grows wild and sullen as we ascend; the hills are strewn with shattered fragments of rock, or worn into battered and fantastic crags; the bottoms of the ravines are soaked and barren as if the winter floods had just left them. Presently we are riding among great snowdrifts. It is the first day of May. We walk on the snow, and pack a basketful on one of the mules, and pelt each other with snowballs. We have gone back another month in the calendar and are now at the place where "winter lingers in the lap of spring." Snowdrops, crocuses, and little purple grape-hyacinths are blooming at the edge of the drifts. The thorny shrubs and bushes, and spiny herbs like astragalus and cousinia, are green-stemmed but leafless, and the birds that flutter among them are still in the first rapture of vernal bliss, the gay music that follows mating and precedes nesting. Big dove-coloured partridges, beautifully marked with black and red, are running among the rocks. We are at the turn of the year, the surprising season when the tide of light and life and love swiftly begins to rise. From this Alpine region we descend through two months in half a day. It is mid-March on a beautiful green plain where herds of horses were feeding around an encampment of black Bedouin tents; the beginning of April at Khan Meithelun, on the post-road, where there are springs, and poplar-groves, in one of which we eat our lunch, with lemonade cooled by the snows of Hermon; the end of April at Dimas, where we find our tents pitched upon the threshing-floor, a levelled terrace of clay looking down upon the flat roofs of the village. Our camp is 3,600 feet above sea-level, and our morning path follows the telegraph-poles steeply down to the post-road, and so by a more gradual descent along the hard and dusty turnpike toward Damascus. The landscape, at first, is bare and arid: rounded reddish mountains, gray hillsides, yellowish plains faintly tinged with a thin green. But at El-Hami the road drops into the valley of the Barada, the far-famed River Abana, and we find ourselves in a verdant paradise.