Our superlative expressions are prostituted to such base uses that it is hard to find words to picture adequately these colossal structures. To say that they are most majestic, gigantic, stupendous, is only to trifle with terms. The mere partition-wall beneath us is nineteen feet thick, a single stone in one of the gate-towers is twenty-five feet long, and the entrance stairway, now half-buried beneath an orchard, is a hundred and fifty feet wide. Everything about us is immense; yet the parts are so nicely proportioned that at first their size does not seem very unusual. The German archæologists warned me against jumping carelessly from one stone to another. “The distance between them will be greater than you think.” You have to revise your ordinary judgments of perspective before you can realize that yonder little alcove in the Great Court is as big as an ordinary church, or can make yourself believe that the outlines of the Temple of the Sun enclose an area as large as that of Westminster Abbey, or can break the habit of thinking condescendingly of the “Smaller Temple”—which is one of the finest Græco-Roman edifices in existence. Suddenly you see the acropolis in its real immensity and beauty, and then you understand how the most scholarly of all Syrian travelers could say that the temples of Baalbek “are like those of Athens in lightness, but far surpass them in vastness; they are vast and massive like those of Thebes, but far excel them in airiness and grace.”[55] [Illustration: The Acropolis of Baalbek—1, The Propylæa; 2, The Forecourt; 3, The Court of the Altar; 4, The Basilica of Constantine; 5, The Great Altar of the Temple; 6, Byzantine Baths; 7, The Temple of Jupiter-Baal; 8, The Six Standing Columns; 9, The Great Stones in the Foundation Wall; 10, The Temple of Bacchus.] From the entrance stairway at the east to the Great Temple at the west, the arrangement is grandly cumulative. Each succeeding architectural feature is larger and more beautiful than that which precedes it. As you view the acropolis from above the portico, your eye is drawn on and on, past the symmetrical forecourt and the great Court of the Altar, under delicately chiseled arches and graceful cornices, through the Triple Gate and the temple portal, up to the culmination of it all—the six tall columns which still rise above the ruins of the Temple of the Sun. No! this is not yet the climax of the glories of Baalbek; for beyond those slender shafts the hoary head of Lebanon, towering far into the sky, at once dwarfs and dignifies, enslaves and ennobles, the puny massiveness of the sanctuary of Baal.