It was well along in the afternoon when we reached Baalbec, and drove through a cloud of dust to a hotel which stands in a mud village near the ruins. Long before we arrived we could make out massive remnants of what was once a wonder of the world, and remains no less so to-day. We could distinguish sections of the vast wall, and, towering high above them, the six columns of the Temple of the Sun. I knew those six columns. I had carried a picture of them in my mind ever since that winter so long ago when the old first edition of the _New Pilgrim's Progress_ became familiar in our household. I know they were seventy-five feet high and eight feet through, and had blocks of stone on the top of them as big as our old-fashioned parlor at home; also, that they were probably erected by giants. Those items had made an impression that had lasted. Now, here they were, outlined against the sky, in full view and perfectly familiar, but never in the world could they be as big as the book said. Why, these were as slender and graceful as fairy architecture! I recalled that there were some big stones to see, stones laid by Cain and his giants when the world was new. Perhaps they would not be so very big, after all. I had a feeling that we ought to hurry. We did hurry--Laura and I. We did not wait for the party, but set out straight for the ruins, through narrow streets and byways, with beggars at our heels. By-and-by we came to a rushing brook, and just beyond it were the temple walls. I remembered now. There had been a wonderful garden outside the temples in the old days, and this stream had made it richly verdant and beautiful. There was no garden any more. Only some grass and bushes, such as will gather about an oasis. They would not let us into the temple enclosure until our party came, so we wandered around the outer walls and gazed up at cornices and capitals and entablatures as beautiful, we thought, as any we had seen at Athens. Then the party arrived, and there was a gatekeeper to let us in. It would take a man in perfect health to carry away even an approximate impression of Baalbec. Trying to remember now, I seem to have spent the afternoon in some amazing delirium of tumbling walls and ruined colonnades; of heaped and piled fragments; of scarred and defaced sculpture; of Titanic masonry flung about by the fury of angry gods. Athens had been a mellowed and hallowed dream of the past; Ephesus a vast suggestion of ancient greatness buried and overgrown; Baalbec was a wild agony of destruction and desecration crying out to the sky. [Illustration: FROM THE TIME OF ADAM BAALBEC BECAME A PLACE OF ALTARS]