Then the vision fades, and with a sense of personal loss and a regret that is almost anger, you look out again from under the dark branches of the little grove to the bleak, bare mountainside, and the wind in the topmost boughs seems to sing the lament of Zechariah— “Wail, O fir tree, For the cedar is fallen, Because the glorious ones are destroyed: Wail, O ye oaks of Bashan, For the strong forest is come down.”[51] Yet still some glorious ones of the strong forest rise proudly on their throne in Lebanon. This tree, so beautiful that it is pictured on the seal of the college at Beirut, has been called the Symmetrical Cedar. These many trunks, apparently springing from a single root, we know as the Seven Sisters. Those two that stand side by side without the wall at a little distance from the main group, are the Sentinels. On a hillside are St. John and St. James, immense, fatherly trees with trunks forty-five feet in circumference and gigantic forks in which a dozen people could sit together. Then there is the Guardian, oldest and largest of all, its great trunk twisted and gnarled by struggles against the storms of ages, the names which famous travelers carved a century ago not yet covered by its slowly growing bark. But the knotted, wrinkled, lightning-scarred giant is crowned by a garland of evergreen, and the venerable tree, which perhaps heard the sound of Hiram’s axemen, may still be standing proudly erect when the achievements of our own century are dimmed in the ancient past. [Illustration: The Guardian, the oldest Cedar of Lebanon] [Illustration: The six great columns and the Temple of Bacchus] “The Cedars of the Lord”—we understand now why the peasantry of Lebanon call them thus. It has become our own name for them too. Long before we ride downward from their royal solitude to the Great Sea and the great busy world, we have come to think of them as in deed and truth, “The trees of Jehovah ... The cedars of Lebanon, which He hath planted.” CHAPTER XIII THE GIANT STONES OF BAALBEK The most impressive of all the ancient temples of Syria can now be reached by a comfortable railway journey from either Damascus or Beirut. But this way the traveler comes upon the ruins too quickly to appreciate adequately their splendid situation and marvelous size. I shall always be thankful that, on my first visit to Baalbek, I approached it very slowly as I rode from our camp among the cedars of Lebanon. For the longer you look at these temples and the greater the distance from which you behold them, the more fully do you realize that whatever race first built a shrine here chose the spot which, of all their land, had the largest, noblest setting for a sanctuary; and the better also do you understand that these structures had to be made unique in their grandeur because anything less imposing would have seemed paltry in comparison with the surrounding glories of nature.