To recover from all these emotions, Lady Hester resolved to visit Baalbeck. She set out on October 18, and, from fear of the plague, she carried away provisions for the entire journey. She will not become an accomplished fatalist until many years afterwards.... She conceived even meat-puddings, which were theoretically to keep for several months and which set the teeth of the escort on edge, so invincible were their hardness and dryness! A thing decided upon being for her a thing done, the doctor was obliged to put up with the puddings, not without sadness. She had also the idea of travelling on donkeys, she and all her people. She had time to spare, and she was incensed at the complete oblivion in which her relatives and friends in England had left her. She thought in this way to attract the attention of the consuls and the merchants, and to make the disgrace of this equipage fall upon all those who ought to have watched over her welfare. A Pitt travelling on a donkey! What a bomb in Downing Street! Yes, but the absent go quickly. The plain of the Bekaa brought them comfortably to Baalbeck. The camp was pitched beyond the town, at the springs of the Litani. From Ras-el-Aia the travellers contemplated one of the most beautiful districts of Asia, and every evening they found a new charm. In the distance, the great white sheik, the solemn Hermon, the slopes of the Lebanon, the deep and quiet valley showing the harmony of its verdure, wearied and fatigued by the summer, around the Temple of Baal, the six columns light, exquisite, fragile and, nevertheless, living symbol of strength and eternity. And to give to this country of light a more human beauty, tents scattered at the foot of a mosque and long flocks of reddish and grey sheep coming to drink. What were Lady Hester's feelings? What reflections assailed her when she walked in the Acropolis, traversing the courts surrounded by exedras, encountering the capitals in rose-coloured granite of Hassouan, the lustral basins with sculptures so delicate that the tritons and the chariots appeared cameos, passing under the compartment-ceilings of the Temple of Bacchus, halting, in astonishment, before the principal arch of the door, of which the audacious jet cleaves the sky, before the walls where, amongst the stone lacework, are found everywhere the egg and the arrow, emblem of life and of death? The doctor is a confidant too discreet. His personal taste leads him to deplore the gigantic stones which form the sub-basement of the temple. He does not like the Trilithon! He finds that the colossal dimensions of the three monoliths are not in harmony with the rest of the edifice and destroy all symmetry! But it is an opinion in which he stands quite alone. He was not able to resist the pleasure of writing on the walls of the temple some verses in honour of Lady Hester: