It is said that women are still bought and sold in the Turkish possessions. Not long ago there was a regular trade in the black girls who were brought across the Sahara from Central Africa and shipped through Tripoli into Syria and other parts of Turkey. Before the English took hold of Egypt this traffic was carried on through the Nile Valley and was winked at by the officials. According to the law of the Koran marriages with slaves are legal. The wives of the Sultans have usually been slaves brought in from Georgia and Circassia, plump girls with fair complexions and red hair bringing the highest prices, perhaps as much as the cost of half a dozen fine white horses. I hear that Circassian girls often welcomed being sold, as they thus escaped the hardships of their own country. Such as could play on the zither and other musical instruments always brought more than the ignorant. In the past, five thousand dollars was not a high price for a Circassian girl, while any good-looking Georgian maiden of twelve would bring two hundred dollars and upward. The children of such slave wives are legitimate. CHAPTER XXVIII BAALBEK THE WONDERFUL I am in the Valley of Lebanon, the high, narrow plain which lies between the two ranges of the Lebanon Mountains. The word Lebanon means “white,” perhaps because of the walls of chalk or limestone which are a feature of the whole range. Just now the highest peaks are white with snow. These ranges extend north and south parallel with the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Beginning a little below the border of Asia Minor, they lose themselves in the Holy Land. In reading of them I have always thought they were only hills. They are higher than any mountains of our country east of the Mississippi, and the average height of the range nearest the coast is a thousand feet greater than that of Mount Washington. Mount Hermon is more than nine thousand feet high and Jebel Makmel measures ten thousand two hundred feet. The elevation of the Valley of Lebanon itself is twice that of the topmost peaks of the Blue Ridge of Virginia, and it slopes from here to the north as far as Aleppo and to the south beyond Dan, where rises the Jordan. In this little valley, which is less than one hundred miles long and from five to eight miles wide, walled by these mighty mountains, lie the ruins of Baalbek, once the most wonderful temples known to the ages. I have spent hours in wandering through them, and their immensity and beauty steadily grow upon me. I despair of being able to describe them and can only hope to give you bits of the details.