Shortly after leaving Aleih, the train turns straight east and climbs with labored puffings up the shoulder of Jebel Keneiseh to the watershed, 4,800 feet above Beirut. It is very much cooler now. In mid-summer, refreshing breezes blow down from unseen snowbanks among the mountaintops. In winter—if, indeed, the traffic is not entirely blocked by drifts which choke the railway cuts—the journey is memorable for its piercing, inescapable cold, and the natives who gather idly at the stations wear heavy sheepskin cloaks and keep their heads and shoulders swathed in thick shawls, though, strangely enough, their legs may be bare and their frost-bitten feet protected only by low slippers. At last the jolting of the rack-and-pinion ceases, the train quickens its speed, passes through two short tunnels, swings around a high embankment; and over the crests of the lower hills we see a long, narrow stretch of level country, bordered on its farther side by a wall-like line of very steep mountains. The profile of the “Eastern Mountains”—as we behold them from this point we can hardly avoid using the Syrian name for Anti-Lebanon—seems almost exactly horizontal, and the resemblance of the range to a tremendous rampart is heightened by the massive buttresses which reach out at regular intervals between the courses of the winter torrents. The valley before us is that which the Greeks named _Coele-Syria_ or “Hollow Syria.” In modern Arabic it is called the _Bikaʿ_ or “Cleft.” Just as in Palestine the Jordan River and its two lakes are hemmed in by mountains which rise many thousand feet above, so in Syria the Bikaʿ stretches between the parallel ranges of Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon. There is, however, one striking difference between the two valleys. That of the Jordan is a deep depression, and the mouth of the river is nearly 1,300 feet below the surface of the Mediterranean. On the other hand, the central valley of Syria throughout its entire length lies considerably above sea-level, and at its highest point reaches an elevation of about 4,000 feet. The Bikaʿ, which is seventy miles long and from seven to ten miles wide, is exceedingly fertile, and in it rise the two largest rivers of Syria. Near their sources the Orontes and Leontes pass within less than two miles of each other; yet the former flows to the north past Kama and Aleppo, while the latter turns southward and reaches the Mediterranean between Tyre and Sidon. [Illustration: Conventionalized cross-section of Syria from Beirut (B) to Damascus (D). The horizontal distances are marked in miles, the vertical in feet.]