There are few real rivers in this land. Although they make Damascus so fertile, Abana and Pharpar are hardly more than noisy creeks. It is true that parts of Lebanon fairly sweat with springs, but hardly half a dozen of these reach the coast except as winter torrents whose stony beds dry up completely when the summer comes. The Jordan in the far south, the Leontes, which flows into the Mediterranean between Tyre and Sidon, and the Orontes in the north—these complete the tale of Syrian rivers, and Hama is the only city in the country whose stream appears as a prominent feature in the landscape. It winds and twists so that you meet it at almost every turn of the street. Along one bank, a line of closely latticed windows mark the harems of the wealthier citizens; farther on, a little group of women are washing clothes under the shade of the cypress trees; yonder a weary train of mules are standing knee-deep in the cool water, while a crowd of naked boys are sporting in the shallow stream with as much energy and enjoyment as any truant brothers of the West. It is perhaps because the Orontes goes to the northward instead of flowing south, as do the other important Syrian rivers, that it is now known as _el-ʿAsi_, “the Rebel”; or the name may have been given, as some old Moslem writers suggest, because its channel is so low that the stream cannot be used for irrigation unless its water is artificially raised. There is a noise so loud and constant that you have almost ceased to hear it—a dull, grave diapason, fuller and deeper than the heaviest organ-stop. Now, slowly and painfully, it forces up a few tones of the scale, then drops sullenly to its key-note. “Do mi sol, DO DO DO. Do sol la, DO DO DO”—on through the day and the night and the century. It is the music of the _naʿûra_, the water-wheels of the Orontes. You see them now and then in southern villages, but as other cataracts are to Niagara, so are all other water-wheels to the water-wheels of Hama. Great wooden frames revolving painfully upon wooden axles as, by means of buckets along the circumference, the river lifts itself up to the level of the terraces above—these wheels approach very near to perpetual motion. We stand amazed before one that is forty feet high, until the eye travels down the river to another wheel of sixty feet; and our guide takes us out to the edge of the city where a monster ninety feet in diameter is playing its slow, solemn tune.