"Nobody knows when these temples were built; but it is generally believed that the city to which they belonged was the Heliopolis of the Greeks and Romans. There is no authentic history of the place earlier than the fourth century, but coins of Heliopolis have been found of the second century, which show it was then a Roman city. There are three temples here, and they bear the names of 'The Great Temple,' 'The Temple of the Sun,'and 'The Circular Temple.' We have been through them, or, rather, of what remains of them, and to say we have been impressed by their grandeur is to convey a very faint idea of our feelings. We have seen nothing in the country to compare with them, and our admiration for their builders is as great as it can possibly be. "It would take many pages for me to describe the courts, and porticos, and portals, and other parts or accessories of these temples at Baalbec, and I should turn your head into an ant-hill of figures long before I could get through. You would be constantly reminded of what we told you of the temples of Karnak and Thebes, in Egypt, and perhaps you might grow impatient before I reached the end. Rather than run the risk of anything of the kind I'll jump all that, and come at once to what kept us in a string of exclamation points all the time we were walking among the ruins. "The great wonder of Baalbec was the size of the stones used in the work of construction. Wherever you go, whether in the vaulted arches beneath the platform, through the subterranean passages that were used as stables in the Middle Ages, or among the walls and the rows of columns in court and portico, the immensity of the stones takes away your breath. Hewn stones twelve, fifteen, or twenty feet long, and proportionally wide and high, are in the walls, and as regularly laid up as though they were common bricks. "When you have become accustomed to these, the guide takes you to where there are blocks, not a few but many, varying from twenty-four to thirty feet long, and proportionally wide and deep. Some of them are way up in the air at the tops of columns sixty or seventy feet high, and you can't help wondering what kind of machinery must have been used to get them there. "You get tired of saying 'Here's another,' 'Look at this,' 'See this one,' and similar expressions, and then you tell the guide as much. You are tired of seeing so many of these great blocks. "Then he takes you round to the western wall, and points to a section of it. Your eyes follow the direction of his hand. "In that wall, twenty feet above the ground, are three stones, lying end to end. They are thirteen feet square at the ends, and their respective lengths are sixty-three, sixty-three and three-quarters, and sixty-four feet.