The order of the narrative now takes us away from Palestine itself, to the more northern parts of Syria, where the Survey party spent the months of July, August, and September, recruiting their health, and arranging the field-work.
On the morning of June the 16th, 1873, we arrived in the Bay of Beyrout, and landed just as Midhat Pacha left the harbour, having been superseded, in the post of Governor of Syria, in favour of Hallet Pacha. The praises of Midhat as an able, upright, and liberal statesman were in the mouths of all European residents, and his dismissal was sincerely regretted.
On Tuesday, the 24th of June, I set out, at the head of my party, on a march to Damascus, along the French road. We wound slowly up the sides of Lebanon, here covered with pines, and veiled above with fleecy clouds, which, when the wind blows from the sea, gather daily on the summits, and swell the grapes by a soft damp mist, giving great potency to the Lebanon wine. Arriving at a height of over three thousand feet, we lost sight of the plain and the white city, and marched on in the mist until two p.m., only resting at a little mud cottage, where was a stream of icy water. We then began to descend, and beneath us was spread out one of the finest views in Syria. The broad flat plain of the Litany River separates the two ranges of Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, and runs north and south, with the river in the middle. The outline of Anti-Lebanon was beautifully varied, with a long succession of blunt peaks, rolling ridges, knife-edged spurs, divided by deep narrow ravines, the whole bathed in the soft bright afternoon sunlight; some hills were thin and blue in the distance, some rocky and rugged in front, while the shadows were already creeping slowly up the feet of the mountains and across the plain. The Bukei'a, as the plain itself is called, was all yellow with corn, the white road, skirted by tall poplars, running across it; and, on the south, the background was formed by the dark ridge of Hermon, on which a solitary streak of snow still remained.
In a couple of hours we reached the plain, the horses being much fatigued, and one unfit for riding. We remained for the night at a miserable wooden house at Stûra.