But all was not fantastic vision. From the summit of one of those hills I saw what was then worth a pilgrimage through half the world to see, the cedar grove of Lebanon.[21] After a day of unusual fatigue and perplexity, I had found my path blocked up by a perpendicular pile of rock. To all but myself the difficulty might have been impracticable; but my habits had given me the spring and sinew of a panther; I bounded against the marble, and after long effort, by the help of weeds and scattered roots of the wild vines, climbed my perilous way to the summit. An endless range of Syria lay beneath; the sea and the wilderness gleamed on my left and right; and a rich succession of dells, crowded with the date, the olive, and the grape, in their autumnal dyes, spread out before me, as far as the eye could reach, in a land whose air is pure as crystal. A sound of trumpets and wild harmonies arose, and I discovered, at an almost viewless depth below, a concourse of people moving through the hollows of the mountains. The tendency of man to man is irresistible; and that unexpected sight, where but the wild beast and the eagle were to have been my companions, gave me the first sensation of pleasure that I had long experienced. Bounding from rock to rock with a hazardous rapidity which arrested the crowd in astonishment and alarm, I joined them, just in time to see the shafts and slings laid down, which they had prepared for my coming, in the uncertainty whether I were a wolf or the leader of a troop of mountain robbers! [Sidenote: On Scriptural Ground] They formed one of the many caravans which annually gathered from the shores of the Mediterranean to worship at Lebanon. Their homage to sacred groves had been transmitted from the earliest antiquity, and was universal in the realms of paganism. To the Jew, worship on the hill and under the tree was prohibited; but the forest that Solomon had chosen, the trees of which the first Temple was built, the foliage which shaded the first planters of the earth, must to the descendant of Abraham be full of reverent interest. The ground was Scriptural; the fiery string of the prophet Ezekiel had been struck in its praise; the noblest raptures of our poets celebrated the glory of Lebanon; the names of the surrounding landscape recalled lofty and lovely memories; the vale of EDEN led to the mountain of the Cedars!